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The global reach of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing localized policy reactions provides a case to uncover how a global crisis translates into linguistic discourse. Based on the JSI Timestamped Web Corpora that are automatically POS-tagged and accessible via SketchEngine, this study compares French, German, Dutch, and English. After identifying the main names used to denote the virus and its disease, we extracted a total of 1,697 associated terms (according to logDice values) retrieved from news media data from January through October 2020. These associated words were then organized into categories describing the properties of the virus and the disease, their spatio-temporal features and their cause–effect dependencies. Analyzing the output cross-linguistically and across the first 10 months of the pandemic, a fairly stable semantic discourse space is found within and across each of the four languages, with an overall clear preference for visual and biomedical features as associated terms, though significant diatopic and diachronic shifts in the discourse space are also attested.

The research summarises the general framework of N. M. Shansky’s PhD thesis which initiated a range of historical lexicological and synchronic linguistic studies. The paper provides arguments and examples showing the development of the scientist’s ideas on the lexical material of the 19th century. An example is N. M. Shansky’s concept of "semantic centres" in the process of filling in important socio-cultural lacunae. Involving a range of lexemes in structuring the concept "Social Environment" through the formation of relevant connotative components in them (kazarmennost’ – salonnost’ – kabinetnost’ – berlozhnost’ – keleinost’ / Engl. barrackness – salonness – cabinetness or officeness – denness – secrecy) provides a good illustration of the scientist’s idea. The average (relative) number of derivatives with ­ost’­ in the modern language is 3 500 – 4 000 lexemes. The paper examines the lexical and word-formation innovations that expand the field of derivational bases (foreign vocabulary, calques or loan translations, and semi-calques as well as low colloquial vocabulary). Additionally, the study analyses the mechanisms of interaction between the formal and the semantic criteria with the supremacy of the latter as it contributes to the removal of the previous morphonological limitations (derivation from relative adjectives ending in ­skiy). Deriving lexemes with the double ­ost’ suffix has become possible within the word-formation pattern ending in ­ost’: one suffix is in the derivational base, the other – in the stem of the derived word (skorostnost’, lichnostnost’ / Engl. high­speedness, personhood). The paper also outlines the chronological dissonance in the formation of adjectival nouns ending in ­skost’ in Russian abroad half a century ahead of the time they appeared in the language of the metropole. The ­skost’ pattern expands the nominative field by means of including surname derivatives (dostoevskost’, chekhovskost’, stalinskost’, khrushchevskost’, and others). The semantic-motivational stimulus is the "semantic increment" formed in relative adjectives due to the strong pragmatic connotation of particular precedent surnames. Thus, lexemes with the derivational suffix ­ost’­ in the modern language show ample opportunities for development both on the basis of intra-lingual potentials and as a result of fo reign language influence. The research employed critical-analytical, constructive-synthetic methods, definitional analysis, the method of distinguishing between synchronic and diachronic word-formation, multiple motivation, the method of analysing usual and occasional words. publishedVersion

In this paper, I study the difference between the two goal-cases of the Mordvin languages, namely, the illative and the lative. A spatial case system with two productive goal-cases but only one case for each of the other spatial relations (i.e., location, source, and path) is a rare phenomenon in languages. To explain thissituation, I study the semantics of the cases. I analyze the senses of the two cases, i.e., I study what meanings are expressed by them, and compare the semantic structures of the cases. Both of the cases are used to express mostly the same senses, but the frequencies of the senses differ between the cases. To explain this, I employ the concept of specificity. Specificity refers to the phenomenon where a relation between Trajectorand Landmark is conceptualized as either more or less specific. The comparison of the semantics of the two cases reveals that the illative is used with more and the lative with less specific conceptualizations.In this paper, I study the difference between the two goal-cases of the Mordvin languages, namely, the illative and the lative. A spatial case system with two productive goal-cases but only one case for each of the other spatial relations (i.e., location, source, and path) is a rare phenomenon in languages. To explain this situation, I study the semantics of the cases. I analyze the senses of the two cases, i.e., I study what meanings are expressed by them, and compare the semantic structures of the cases. Both of the cases are used to express mostly the same senses, but the frequencies of the senses differ between the cases. To explain this, I employ the concept of specificity. Specificity refers to the phenomenon where a relation between Trajector and Landmark is conceptualized as either more or less specific. The comparison of the semantics of the two cases reveals that the illative is used with more and the lative with less specific conceptualizations. Kokkuvõte. Riku Erkkilä: Illatiivi ja latiivi tähendused mordva keeltes. Käesolevas töös uurin erinevusi mordva keelte kahe sihikääne ehk illatiivi ja latiivi vahel. Kohakäänete süsteem, kus on kaks produktiivset sihikäänet, kuid ainult üks kääne teiste kohasuhete väljendamiseks, on maailma keeltes tavaliselt haruldane nähtus. Selle olukorra selgitamiseks uurin käänete semantikat. Analüüsin, milliseid tähendusi käänded väljendavad, ja võrdlen käänete semantilisi struktuure. Mõlemaid käändeid kasutatakse enamasti samademõtete väljendamiseks, aga mõtete sagedused on käänete vahel erinevad. Selle selgitamiseks kasutan spetsiifilisuse mõistet. Spetsiifilisus viitab nähtusele, kus trajektori ja orientiiri vaheline seos kontseptualiseeritakse kas enam või vähem spetsiifilisena. Käänete semantika võrdlusest selgub, et illatiivikasutatakse spetsiifilisemate ja latiivi vähem spetsiifiliste kontseptualisatsioonidega.

The report describes the problems in constructing a computational program that converts the Standard Finnish Bible text into Kitee dialect. The current application is based on the analysis and disambiguation of text, without resorting to morphophonological rules. The omission of morphophonological rules has the effect that the lexicon structure becomes complicated and quite tedious to maintain. The positive side in this solution is that error tracing and correction is rather easy. We have a plan to test also the solution, where morphophonological rules play the major part, and when they fail, language analysis and disambiguation will solve the rest of problems.

Un idéal solidement ancré dans la formation des traducteurs-interprètes est celui de « traduire sans ajouts ni modifications ». Or dès l’instant que l’on aborde des textes multimodaux, on se trouve confronté au problème que pose l’image, son sens, sa lecture, son interprétation. L’objectif de cet article est d’esquisser une méthode d’analyse de l’image qui permette de sensibiliser les étudiants en traduction multimodale à l’existence d’un seuil interprétatif entre le sens global que peut véhiculer l’image en tant que telle, d’une part, et les interprétations plus personnelles que cette dernière peut éveiller chez son récepteur (et donc le traducteur) d’autre part. Le principe, fondé sur la théorie de la pertinence, est que les indices visuels et compositionnels de l’image, leur saillance relative et leur convergence sémantique éventuelle, combinés aux facteurs contextuels de la production initiale du document, constitueraient les données sémiotiques fondamentales à prendre en compte dans le processus de traduction. En revanche, toute projection de sens externe à l’image et émanant du traducteur-interprète lui-même serait à traiter avec plus de circonspection, puisqu’elle reviendrait à recontextualiser le message visuel original, à le colorer d’un sémantisme particulier, et donc à le modifier par un ajout de significations.

There is disagreement as to the formation period of Chabacano, Philippine Creole Spanish. This article examines lexical items that have been claimed to stem from an early period of formation of Chabacano (Jacobs & Parkvall 2020). As a response to these claims, we show with ample dialectological and diachronic evidence that Chabacano items ansina ‘this way, like this,’ endenantes ‘a little while ago’, onde ‘where,’ and vos ‘2sg’ are compatible with any period of formation for the Creole. Consequently, the presence of these lexical items in the Chabacano varieties does not link their formation to a hypothetical proto-Creole created before 1640, nor does it lend proof to the hypothesis that the current varieties descend directly from it. In general, we argue that creoles require as rigorous diachronic and diatopic studies as their lexifiers to show the maturity of Creole Studies as a field of inquiry.

Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s). The ambition of the Open Translation Models, Tools and Services (OPUSMT) project is to develop state-of-the art neural machine translation (NMT) models that can freely be distributed and applied in research as well as professional applications. The goal is to pre-train translation models on a large scale on openly available parallel data and to create a catalogue of such resources for streamlined integration and deployment. For the latter we also implement and improve web services and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools that can be used in on-line interfaces and professional workflows. Furthermore, we want to enable the re-use of models to avoid repeating costly training procedures from scratch and with this contribute to a reduction of the carbon footprint in MT research and development. The ELG pilot project focused on European minority languages and improved translation quality in low resource settings and the integration of MT services in the ELG infrastructure.

This paper describes the success of OPUS, starting from a small side-project but leading to a full-fledged ecosystem for training and deploying open machine translation systems. We briefly present the current state of the framework focusing on the mission of increasing language coverage and translation quality in public translation models and tools that can easily be integrated in end-user applications and professional workflows. OPUS now provides the biggest hub of freely available parallel data and thousands of open translation models have been released supporting hundreds of languages in various combinations. Non

Funding Information: The MEG recordings were conducted at Aalto University with the support of Grant #315553 from the Academy of Finland. This research was also supported by a personal grant to DH from the Jenni and Antti Wihuri Foundation and to RS from the Sigrid Jusélius Foundation. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s). The nature of auditory processing problems in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) is still poorly understood. Much research has been devoted to determining the extent to which DLD is associated with general auditory versus language-specific dysfunction. However, less emphasis has been given to the role of different task conditions in these dysfunctions. We explored whether children with DLD demonstrate atypical interhemispheric asymmetry during the auditory processing of speech and non-speech sounds and whether this interhemispheric balance is modulated by attention. Magnetoencephalography was used to record auditory evoked fields in 18 children (9 to 10 years old), 9 with DLD and 9 with language typical development, during active or passive listening to speech and non-speech sounds. A linear mixed model analysis revealed a bilateral effect of attention in both groups. Participants with DLD demonstrated atypical interhemispheric asymmetry, specifically in the later (185–600 ms) time window butonly during the passive listening condition. During the active task, the DLD group did not differ from the typically developed children in terms of hemispheric balance of activation. Our results support the idea of an altered interhemispheric balance in passive auditory response properties in DLD. We further suggest that an active task condition, or top–down attention, can help to regain leftward lateralization, particularly in a later stage of activation. Our study highlights the highly dynamic and interhemispheric nature of auditory processing, which may contribute to the variability in reports of auditory language processing deficits in DLD.

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Darja Fišer and Andreas Witt, published by Walter deGruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. All rights reserved.

In pursuing the historical emergence of the discourse on terrorism, this study trawls the “digital Gulf of Bothnia” in the form of a corpus of combined Swedish and Finnish digitized newspaper texts. Through a cross-lingual exploration of the uses of the concept of terrorism in historical Swedish and Finnish news, we examine meanings anchored in the two culturally close but still decidedly different national political contexts. The study is an outcome of an integrative interdisciplinary effort.

The report demonstrates how unwanted expressions in text can be replaced with correct, or desired, expressions. In order for the replacements to be correct, the text must first be analysed and disambiguated, so that replacement rules can be written. The method is tested using idioms that use the key word panna. In disrupted expressions this verb is replaced with verbs pistää or laittaa. The system was tested with a small corpus. No faulty replacements were found, and all cases were replaced that needed replacement.

Videoconferencing technologies have become increasingly common in different sectors of life as a means to enable real-time interaction between people who are located in different places. In this chapter, we explore interactional data from synchronous hybrid university-level foreign language classrooms in which one student participates via a telepresence robot, a remote-controlled videoconferencing tool. In contrast to many other forms of video-mediated interaction, the user of a telepresence robot can move the robot and thereby (re-)orient to the space, the other participants and material objects that might be outside his immediate video screen. We employ an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) perspective to explore Barad’s (Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press: 2007) notion of agency as a distributed phenomenon that emerges from assemblages of humans and materials. We demonstrate the complex nature of telepresent agency by investigating where agential cuts lie in three short episodes that involve mediated perception, touch and movement. Based on the analyses, we discuss how the telepresence technology configures learning environments by making new kinds of competences and forms of adaptation relevant for teachers and students.

We analyze the learning dynamics of neural language and translation models using Loss Change Allocation (LCA), an indicator that enables a fine-grained analysis of parameter updates when optimizing for the loss function. In other words, we can observe the contributions of different network components at training time. In this article, we systematically study masked language modeling, causal language modeling, and machine translation. We show that the choice of training objective leads to distinctive optimization procedures, even when performed on comparable Transformer architectures. We demonstrate how the various Transformer parameters are used during training, supporting that the feed-forward components of each layer are the main contributors to the optimization procedure. Finally, we find that the learning dynamics are not affected by data size and distribution but rather determined by the learning objective.

This article aims to introduce new insights to further the understanding of easy language (EL) and plain language (PL) as examples of tailored language and place them within a broader context of linguistic varieties. We examine EL and PL in relation to standard language, and we consider the degree of conscious effort required in tailoring and the compliance with the codified norms of standard language. Both EL and PL are used in asymmetric communication: PL to mediate between specialists and the general public and EL in communication with people with language barriers. We argue that while these varieties have similar purposes and methods, they also have significant differences; for example, the tailoring moves in opposite directions, as PL seeks general comprehensibility and EL aims to reach special and vulnerable groups. The differences between PL and EL are primarily linked to social prestige and the potential risk of stigma related to their use.

Despite the early establishment of Easy Language in Sweden in the 1960s and a growing interest in producing Easy Language materials, linguistic research on Easy Swedish remains scarce. This literature review aims to describe how Easy Swedish has been understood in previous research, bringing together a wide range of perspectives and approaches. Applying a meta-narrative method, we investigate terms and definitions, descriptions of the target group, and ideologies, discourses, and values that justify Easy Language. Our results show an exclusive focus on written language and use of the term lättläst (Easy to Read), and a lack of a universal definition of the term. The results also show general agreement on the heterogeneity of the target group. Controversy arises from different perspectives on reading as well as the breadth of the concept, and the conceptualisation of Easy Swedish varies depending on the aims, discipline, and studied material. publishedVersion

The Donate Speech campaign aimed to collect 10 000 hours of ordinary, casual Finnish speech to be used for studying language as well as for developing technology and services that can be readily used in the languages spoken in Finland. In this project, particular attention has been paid to allowing for both academic and commercial use of the material. Even though the ambitious target currently seems to evade us, the Donate Speech campaign has managed to collect an extensive resource of more than 3500 h of Finnish colloquial speech with more than 200 000 speech recordings by roughly 50 000 speakers from all over Finland in just a few months.

In this article, we bring together theories of multimodal communication and computational methods to study how primary school science diagrams combine multiple expressive resources. We position our work within the field of digital humanities, and show how annotations informed by multimodality research, which target expressive resources and discourse structure, allow imposing structure on the output of computational methods. We illustrate our approach by analysing two multimodal diagram corpora: the first corpus is intended to support research on automatic diagram processing, whereas the second is oriented towards studying diagrams as a mode of communication. Our results show that multimodally-informed annotations can bring out structural patterns in the diagrams, which also extend across diagrams that deal with different topics., 22 pages, 11 figures. Under review at Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

This paper shows that Finnish has the option of expressing ‘only’-like exclusive meaning with a clausal construction, here called the Exclusive-Negative Construction, ENC. It is similar to the better-known French ne…que construction but differs from it at many points where Finnish and French grammar differ, especially in the way negation is expressed in the two languages. The Finnish ENC contains overt negation, which accounts for its somewhat narrower distribution than the alternative option, the use of the focus particle vain/vaan ‘only’. Adopting the Construction Grammar framework, the paper argues that the ENC is a simple clausal construction with the idiosyncrasy of mixed polarity, a formal division of the clause into a negative and affirmative part. Derivation from an underlying comparative is rejected, but it is shown that the ENC has associations to more explicit ways of expressing exclusion. These conclusions receive support from dialectal and other non-standard data. Kokkuvõte. Maria Vilkuna: Soome keele välistav-eitav konstruktsioon ei...ku(i)n välistust väljendavate keeleliste vahendite võrgustikus. Artiklis näidatakse, et soome keeles võib väljendada välistavat tähendust (nagu ainult) lausekonstruktsiooniga, mida artiklis nimetatakse välistavaks-eitavaks konstruktsiooniks (the Exclusive-Negative Construction, ENC). See sarnaneb prantsuse keele konstruktsiooniga ne...que, ent erineb sellest mitmes aspektis, kus soome ja prantsuse keel üldiseltki erinevad, eriti mis puudutab eituse väljendamise viise kahes keeles. Soome konstruktsioon sisaldab eksplitsiitset eitust, mis seletab seda, miks konstruktsiooni kasutusala on mõnevõrra kitsam kui selle alternatiivil, fookuspartiklil vain/vaan ‘ainult’. Kasutades konstruktsioonigrammatika raamistikku, näidatakse artiklis, et ENC on lausekonstruktsioon, mille eripäraks on kahetine polaarsus: konstruktsioon jaotub vormiliselt eitavaks ja jaatavaks osaks. Väidetakse, et konstruktsioon ei ole tuletatud komparatiivikonstruktsioonist, kuid on seotud eksplitsiitsemalt välistust väljendavate vahenditega. Neid järeldusi toetavad murrete ja muu mittestandardse keelekasutuse andmed.

In this paper, we analyze online discussion threads related to national belonging in Finland, Denmark, and France. These discussions are all related to immigration and the definition of 'legitimate' citizens. Our approach is empirical: the goal is to show how in-groups and out-groups are construed linguistically and discursively in the data and how the interactants negotiate membership categories and express their opinions regarding them. The most important in-group in the datasets consists of the nationals born in the country, whereas the out-group par excellence is formed by Muslims. The data show how the boundaries of national communities are performatively constructed through the everyday discourse of online fora, which constitute an important arena of societal debate today. This discourse draws its force from the reiteration of stereotypical generalizations and the power attached to the written word in a communication environment enabling an efficient dissemination of ideological discourse.

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. All rights reserved. This chapter examines how pragmatic variation interfaces with several dimensions of space, not only geographical space but also social space. We approach space from a variational pragmatics perspective and conceive it as a layered phenomenon with local, regional, and national levels that are intertwined with one another as well as with social dimensions of space. We present an empirical study of greeting behavior in Swedish service encounters to illustrate how these layers of space interact and are relevant for pragmatic variation. Qualitative observations of greeting sequences combined with statistical analyses of several co-variables are used to unravel connections between the choice of a greeting form and spatial and social factors. We show that the levels of nation and region (i. e., data from a certain country and town) can account for a certain degree of variation in the choice of greeting forms, but the local levels of space (i. e., interactions in specific venues) and social variables like the speaker's age and gender also have an explanatory force. Spaces can also bear recognizable cultural meanings to the people who interact in them, triggering certain kinds of social behavior that is symbolically represented in language use.

Syntactic dilemma in causative structures Verbs of ingestion (‘to eat’, ‘to drink’....) Simultaneous direct objects ● Genitive-inessive alternation in marking of the direct-object causee ● Partitive function of the base-verb adjunct Encountered while working as a visiting project researcher at the University of Turku, namely, the ablative object associated with verbs of ingestion in the Mordvin languages – ‘to eat’, ‘to drink’, ‘to smoke’, ‘to breathe’

This work describes the development of a list of monolingual word alignments taken from parallel Russian simplification data. This word lists can be used in such lexical simplification tasks as rule-based simplification applications and lexically constrained decoding for neural machine translation models. Moreover, they constitute a valuable source of information for developing educational materials for teaching Russian as a second/foreign language. In this work, a word list was compiled automatically and post-edited by human experts. The resulting list contains 1409 word pairs in which each “complex” word has an equivalent “simpler” (shorter, more frequent, modern, international) synonym. We studied the contents of the word list by comparing the frequencies of the words in the pairs and their levels in the special CEFR-graded vocabulary lists for learners of Russian as a foreign language. The evaluation demonstrated that lexical simplification by means of single-word synonym replacement does not occur often in the adapted texts. The resulting list also illustrates the peculiarities of the lexical simplification task for L2 learners, such as the choice of a less frequent but international word.

Identity as a life story is constructed in social interaction with the surrounding world in a narrative continuum through language. When given pedagogic recognition for active meaning-making and construction of personal identity, the student is encounteredin a just and holistic manner. In school, skills related to identity construction are taught especially in language education. In Finland, the central aim established in the Core Curriculum for learning mother tongue and literature is to teach students linguistic skills with which to word, interpret, understand, make meaning and construct oneself and the world in interaction with others. Although the identity-mission is shared by all curricular activities, the importance of mother tongue and literature gives reason to call it the ‘identity subject’ proper. Yet, in multilingual educational contexts, not everyone’s mother tongue is equal, as analysed in multi-professional interview data in this paper. For migrant-language speakers, there is a major expectation to learn one of the national languages for participation and active citizenship. This leads to undermining two things. First, the process can also take place vice versa: participation enhances feelings of belonging, which enhances language learning. Second, the first language plays a central role in constructing life-story identity. Although identity constructionis cherished in the Core Curriculum, it is not automatically valued, offered, or endorsed in the context of migrant students learning their own first languages. Linguistic and cultural recognition helps to support the significance of life-story identity,and acknowledging it in structural support and in pedagogic practices will further promote all students’ equity and participation as active involvement. Keywords:language learning, narrative identity, life story, mother tongue, heritage language, belonging, participation, translanguaging, pedagogy

The report describes the process, how Standard Finnish can be converted to Kitee dialect, a speech variety spoken in Northern Karelia. Because the dialect does not have a standard written form, the output of the conversion process is more or less on ad hoc basis. Yet it gives an approximate picture of how each word should be pronounced. The paper discusses possible approaches for implementation and describes the selected approach in detail.

Due to the datafication of our society the necessity to increase data literacy is at an all time high. In this brief paper we present the design of the gamified application GANDALF, aiming to promote data literacy and used in experiment-based research. Following a methodology of research through design, we account for the different phases of the process and frame them as explorative and insightful epistemic stages. Such recount allow us some critical reflection over the design of GANDALF and to formulate five key design considerations that we hope will be useful in the future for the creation of software with similar purposes. publishedVersion

We present a method for extracting a multilingual sentiment annotated dialog data set from Fallout New Vegas. The game developers have preannotated every line of dialog in the game in one of the 8 different sentiments: \textit{anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral, pained, sad } and \textit{surprised}. The game has been translated into English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. We conduct experiments on multilingual, multilabel sentiment analysis on the extracted data set using multilingual BERT, XLMRoBERTa and language specific BERT models. In our experiments, multilingual BERT outperformed XLMRoBERTa for most of the languages, also language specific models were slightly better than multilingual BERT for most of the languages. The best overall accuracy was 54\% and it was achieved by using multilingual BERT on Spanish data. The extracted data set presents a challenging task for sentiment analysis. We have released the data, including the testing and training splits, openly on Zenodo. The data set has been shuffled for copyright reasons., Comment: FDG 2022

In this paper I reconstruct and outline some realisations of different forest ideologies, through the analysis of the digital adaptation of the boardgame ROOT - A Game of Woodland Might and Right. In particular, I use a semiotic square to map the different semantic fields and core strategies of the four different factions of the game, each featuring a different way to engage with forests. The analysis allows me to identify some key ideologies that, embedded in the game, reflect larger conceptualisations of the relationship between humans and woodlands. In the conclusion, the paper highlights how games, encompassing both a rule structure and a narrative layer, can offer a vantage point for the analysis of ideological constructions. Future research could apply similar methods to other games in an attempt to map the many ways in which forestry spaces, and our relations with them, are constructed. publishedVersion

This article serves as an introduction for Arabic readers, especially Palestinian Arab academics, and an invitation to engage in Samaritan research (Samaritanism). A suggested list of topics worthy of research in this field has been added. These studies require, among other things, knowledge of Arabic in particular Middle Arabic, Samaritan Aramaic and Samaritan Hebrew.

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s) Professional discourse is the language used by specialists, such as lawyers, doctors and academics, to communicate the knowledge and assumptions associated with their respective fields. Professional discourse can be especially difficult for non-specialists to understand due to the lexical ambiguity of commonplace words that have a different or more specific meaning within a specialist domain. This phenomena also makes it harder for specialists to communicate with the general public because they are similarly unaware of the potential for misunderstandings. In this article, we present an approach for detecting domain terms with lexical ambiguity versus everyday English. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with three case studies in statistics, law and biomedicine. In all case studies, we identify domain terms with a precision@100 greater than 0.9, outperforming the best performing baseline by 18.1–91.7%. Most importantly, we show this ranking is broadly consistent with semantic differences. Our results highlight the difficulties that existing semantic difference methods have in the cross-domain setting, which rank non-domain terms highly due to noise or biases in the data. We additionally show that our approach generalizes to short phrases and investigate its data efficiency by varying the number of labeled examples.

This paper aims to clarify a point of persistent confusion in the literature: namely, the status of residual verb second. We approach this from both a terminological and typological perspective. Terminologically, traditional usage of residual V2 in the literature has conflated two different senses (one formal, and one historical); we argue that it is essential to keep these two senses separate. We propose a distinction between partial V2 and residual V2 within the general typology of verb second. Following a formal definition of V2 from the recent literature, we define partial-V2 systems as involving genuine instances of V2 that are limited to nondeclarative environments in a given language (e.g. English). By contrast, we (re)define residual V2 as describing purely vestigial structures that do not qualify as formally V2 in the synchronic grammar of a given language, despite their historical origins in an earlier stage in which the language had true V2. In this respect, almost all modern Romance languages provide clear examples of residual V2: the syntax of these languages is only historically related to V2, with all formal traces of V2 having been long lost, even in nondeclaratives. With these clarifications in place, we propose an updated typology of V2 systems, conceiving of it as a spectrum of degrees from partial V2 through strict V2 (as measured by the set of formally-V2 environments that a given language allows).

This is a contribution to a festschrift. This document is dedicated to a young man, who, despite the number of times he has traveled around the Sun, is always open to new thoughts on ways to include languages, especially the smaller ones, and the people who speak them in far-reaching and sustainable open-source de- velopment. Since Trond Trosterud in Tromsø is attributed a terrific track record in transnational and circum-polar linguistics, we try to attract his attention further afield, to languages and phe- nomena he has only touched. The language phenomena addressed here come from Erzya and the Zyrian variety of Komi; Erzya has issues presented but not discussed in his dissertation, whereas Komi brings in issues of adnominal and predicate number marking in conjunction with case homonymy that have been resolved thanks to the flexibility of the infrastructure. These source languages, like others, have documented new dimensions and added shape the ever- growing infrastructure.

The widespread Uralic family offers several advantages for tracing prehistory: a firm absolute chronological anchor point in an ancient contact episode with well-dated Indo-Iranian; other points of intersection or diagnostic non-intersection with early Indo-European (the Late Proto-Indo-European-speaking Yamnaya culture of the western steppe, the Afanasievo culture of the upper Yenisei, and the Fatyanovo culture of the middle Volga); lexical and morphological reconstruction sufficient to establish critical absences of sharings and contacts. We add information on climate, linguistic geography, typology, and cognate frequency distributions to reconstruct the Uralic origin and spread. We argue that the Uralic homeland was east of the Urals and initially out of contact with Indo-European. The spread was rapid and without widespread shared substratal effects. We reconstruct its cause as the interconnected reactions of early Uralic and Indo-European populations to a catastrophic climate change episode and interregionalization opportunities which advantaged riverine hunter-fishers over herders.

This article presents an analysis of the structure and use of the Finnish independent infinitives. Although typological studies have shown that syntactically independent non-finite constructions are widespread in many languages, the understanding of their semantic and intersubjective motivation is still in its early stages. The current paper aims to enrich the understanding of independent non-finite constructions by closely looking at free-standing infinitive constructions in spoken and written Finnish: it combines theoretical concepts of Cognitive Grammar with the methodological tools of Interactional Linguistics to explore the nature of independent infinitives as a resource for conceptualization and the intersubjective functions that it affords. The paper suggests that the fact that independent infinitives are grammatically ungrounded makes them useful in interactional and textual sequences involving affect display. As the indexical functions of infinitives can be explained from their own morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics, the paper makes the more general claim that there is no synchronic evidence that would support the assumption that such constructions ever evolved, via ellipsis, from finite constructions. Methodologically and theoretically, the paper advocates an approach that takes into account both the social and cognitive nature of language, and promotes the view that Cognitive Grammar offers a flexible, semantically rich starting point for the description of intersubjective meanings conveyed by grammar, when combined with the context-sensitive and microanalytical methodology of Interactional Linguistics.

Conceptual change (cc) research tradition is not a single theory, but includes different branches and theoretical models. In these models, somewhat unsystematic use of terminology exists. This study investigates the terminology, lexicons and their overlapping in twelve central scientific articles within cc-research field utilizing a network analysis tool. The articles were selected based on certain criteria representing seminal articles, different cc-branches and reviews and they were published between 1982 and 2018. The study contributes to the discussion about the need of unifying the used terminology, when similar constructs are handled with different terms among the cc-tradition. The study provides a new methodological tool to explore and visualize the occurrence of concepts and inter-relatedness of them among cc-literature. The semantic network analysis reveals similarity in terminology of texts that belong to supposedly same kind of cc-research traditions, and on the other hand, clearly lower similarity between texts in different traditions. The results also show that there has attempts to unify the key-terminology in review articles, but these initiatives have not affected the terminology used texts that belong opposing disciplinary groups. Identifying the overlapping in different models would enable the meaningful unifying of terminology, which again is suggested to be desirable for the future theoretical progress of cc-research.

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The article provides a comprehensive overview of attitudes towards nonbinary pronouns, with the aim of better understanding why these pronouns are either accepted or rejected. Attitudes towards nonbinary they and the neopronouns ze and xe are explored with a thematic analysis of data derived from a larger online survey on pronouns (n = 1128). While the results demonstrate various polarized stances for both types of pronouns, the participants’ reactions highlight greater acceptance of and support for nonbinary they. In addition, the paper proposes that broader ideologies about gender are behind the participants’ overt reactions to nonbinary pronouns. Most notably, while some participants rejected the pronouns on the basis of a binary gender ideology, others viewed gender as a matter of self-identification, accepting any pronoun an individual chooses for themselves.

Human perception relies on chunking up an incoming information stream into smaller units to make sense of it. Evidence of chunking has been found across different domains, including visual events, music, and dance movement. It is largely uncontested that language processing must also proceed in smaller chunks of some kind. What these online chunks consist in is much less understood. In this paper, we propose that cognitively relevant chunks can be identified by crowdsourcing listener perceptions of chunk boundaries in real-time speech, even if the listeners are non-native speakers of the language. We present a paradigm in which experiment participants simultaneously listen to short extracts of authentic speech and mark chunk boundaries using a custom-built tablet application. We then test the internal validity of the method by measuring the extent to which fluent L2 listeners agree on chunk boundaries. To do this, we use three datasets collected within the paradigm and a suite of different statistical methods. The external validity of the method is studied in a separate paper and is briefly discussed at the end.

Scholarship on publics has proliferated during the past two decades, especially in linguistic anthropology. Drawing on Michael Warner's famous formulation, publics are now routinely theorized as a social form predicated on the reflexive circulation of discourse. This article, however, identifies a tension within Warner's conception of publics. On the one hand, Warner levels a critique of liberal publicity, noting its exclusions and contradictions, but on the other hand, he models his own account of publics on the liberal public sphere and assumptions of voluntaristic, free speech. Working from ethnographic research on a government-sponsored nation-branding project undertaken in Macedonia, the article develops a different perspective on publics and their politics. It examines how practices of marketing and strategic communication now pervade public spheres and valorize not voluntaristic participation but discursive engineering, that is, concerted efforts to determine how discourse can and will circulate in some public. When tethered to projects of centralized political control, as happened in Macedonia during Nikola Gruevski's prime ministership (2006-2016), practices of discursive engineering can result in enclosed public spheres. Ultimately, the article asks, what can attention to elite efforts to engineer and enclose public spheres teach about struggles over participation in contemporary contexts of mass publicity?

The report is a statistical survey of the use or various tense and aspect forms of verbs in in text. The source texts are the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili 2.0 and the DAHE corpus. The size of the former is about 25 million words, and the latter has less than half a million words. Comparison is made in the use of various tense and aspect forms in different text types. A more detailed analysis is made with eight fiction books of Shaaban Robert for finding out the degree of consistency in using tense and aspect markers.