Dans cet article, nous présentons le corpus « Multicultural Paris French » (MPF), en en montrant les enjeux théoriques et méthodologiques, ainsi que quelques directions d’exploitation. En visant des données non-standard illustrant ce qu’il est de coutume d’appeler « parler jeune », MPF repose sur une réflexion quant à la façon d’appréhender les situations propices à leur émergence, au-delà d’informations généralement retenues, d’ordres sociodémographiques ou ethniques, ou du degré de formalisme de l’échange. Si ces considérations ne sont évidemment pas évacuées, (...) elles sont combinées à d’autres qui concernent les effets de la relation entre locuteurs au moment de l’enregistrement. De ce fait, MPF apparaît comme un corpus original dans le champ des corpus de français parlé contemporain, tant du point de vue de la nature des données recueillies que de celui du traitement rendu possible par cette spécificité. (shrink)

This article deals with the problem of different distributions of the Spanish pronouns le and lo ‘him, her, polite you’ that may be observed in different realms of the Spanish speaking world. In this paper, as a starting point, the more established and traditional case theory will be compared with the Control System Hypothesis in a particular corpus of a non-standard, Peninsular variant of Spanish. The hypothesis that will then be tested is that the use of the pronouns under focus (...) in this particular variant, as well as in all variants, is based on one and the same semantic substance, but that speakers may apply this substance for different communicative needs, resulting in different distributions of the forms in different language samples of the respective speakers. These differences, then, are not representative of different meanings, but may be representing cultural differences of the respective speech group. The case in focus is middle-class Spanish of the 60s as represented in a novel by Miguel Delibes, and particularly how men and women are addressed. This corpus was chosen because of its particular, non-standard distribution of the pronouns in question, being therefore of particular interest to test the hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper considers Canada’s young offenders in the context from which they enter the youth criminal courtroom. To determine how youth criminal justice courts violate the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act, this analysis relates said context to several phenomena, including legal linguistics, oral language competency, literacy, communicative competency, non-verbal communication, the physical structure of youth courtrooms, and legal translation. As a result of the standards of procedural communication upheld by the Canadian criminal justice system, young people’s (...) rights, including the right to be respected regardless of cultural, ethnic, or linguistic differences, the right to be heard and to participate in proceedings, the right to be sentenced meaningfully, the right to privacy, and the right to be tried in a timely manner are abused in the youth criminal courtroom. Although insufficient structures of procedural communication cause these issues and are beyond the control of counsel, defense counsel are often blamed for their effects. Legal professionals must make important adjustments such as altering the formal speech required in youth criminal courtrooms, employing legal professionals with the role of translating legal jargon to young people in the courtroom, and closing youth courtrooms off from the public to reduce the YCJA violations occurring in youth criminal justice court. These adjustments are ultimately the responsibility of the Canadian criminal justice system. (shrink)

Teachers of children of all ages are enjoined by the National Curriculum for English to develop their pupils’ ability to write in standard English. This study explores the implications of these injunctions by examining the use of non-standard dialect grammar in the writing of 362 texts written by pupils of 11 an 15 years of age. It is established that most of the forms used are found in all four of the geographical regions sampled. The grammatical features of these non-standard (...) dialects and the frequency with which they occur are itemised and compared with a study of spoken English based on the same corpus. There is found to be considerable overlap between these and other recent studies of non-standard dialects in schools, although non-standard dialects are used more widely in speech than in writing. (shrink)

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child‐directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We evaluate two sets of features: One set is generated from the distribution of words into frames defined by the two adjacent words. These features primarily encode syntactic aspects of word usage. The (...) other set is generated from non‐adjacent co‐occurrences between words. These features encode complementary thematic aspects of word usage. Regression models using these distributional features to predict age of acquisition of 656 early‐acquired English words indicate that both types of features improve predictions over simpler models based on frequency and appearance in salient or simple utterance contexts. Syntactic features were stronger predictors of children's production than comprehension, whereas thematic features were stronger predictors of comprehension. Overall, earlier acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for nouns and verbs, and by thematic content related to food and face‐to‐face play topics; later acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for pronouns and question words, and by content related to narratives and object play. (shrink)

We describe a pattern acquisition algorithm that learns, in an unsupervised fashion, a streamlined representation of linguistic structures from a plain natural-language corpus. This paper addresses the issues of learning structured knowledge from a large-scale natural language data set, and of generalization to unseen text. The implemented algorithm represents sentences as paths on a graph whose vertices are words. Significant patterns, determined by recursive context-sensitive statistical inference, form new vertices. Linguistic constructions are represented by trees composed of significant patterns and (...) their associated equivalence classes. An input module allows the algorithm to be subjected to a standard test of English as a Second Language profi- ciency. The results are encouraging: the model attains a level of performance considered to be “intermediate” for 9th-grade students, despite having been trained on a corpus containing transcribed speech of parents directed to small children. (shrink)

This article presents a multimodal video corpus with the principal aim to model and predict the effects of aging in Mild Cognitive Impairment situation on pragmatic and communicative skills. We take as observable variables the verbal pragmatic markers and non-verbal pragmatic markers. This approach, at the interface of the psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences and rehabilitation medicine (speech-language pathology and therapy) is part of a longitudinal research process in an ecological situation (interviews conducted by close intimate of the elderly).In the first part (...) of the article we present the linguistic, cognitive and social characteristics of aging in its continuum up to mild cognitive impairment and pathological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. In the second part, we develop a multimodal approach, in particular to inform and enrich speech and language therapy knowledge. Finally, we present our experimental design and preliminary results on two female participants over 75 years of age with mild cognitive impairment.Our general findings indicate that with aging, verbal pragmatic markers acquire an interactive function that allows people with Mild Cognitive Impairment to maintain intersubjective relationships with their interlocutor. In addition, at the non-verbal level, gestural manifestations are increasingly mobilized over time with a preference for non-verbal pragmatic markers with a referential function and an interactive function. One such non-verbal manifestation compensates for naming deficits, planning difficulties, discursive hitches; while another optimizes and maintains the interaction with the interlocutor.Clinicians have a duty to develop their professional practice through an evidence-based clinical approach whose main objective is to reconcile clinical practice with the best evidence from research (Dollaghan 2007). In the case of speech-language pathology, clinicians consider themselves very limited in this approach (Lof 2011; McCurtin 2011), especially for patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (Mungas et al. 2010; Hopper 2013; Morello 2017) and more specifically when it comes to assessing or supporting language functions (Cummings 2014).The studies focusing on Mild Cognitive Impairment require longitudinal corpora i) to understand the naturally occurring evolutions in subjects, ii) the implication of the cognitive reserve in each individual, and iii) to take advantage of these parameters as evidence for research and earlier rehabilitation. We aim to show the benefits of linguistic and interactional scientific investigation methods through fragile aging, for health professionals and everyday caregivers. (shrink)

Although Dagur and Alsatian represent two typologically distant language families, they share several similarities: both languages are endangered, do not have a unified spelling system, and have few available digital corpora. Given these challenges, the main aim of this article is to compare the noise in corpora for these languages and its impact on part-of-speech (POS) annotation and tagging. We first discuss what strategies can be used to reduce the noise due to spelling inconsistencies observed during corpus collection, using Dagur (...) as an example. We then observe that the distributions of POS trigrams in the manually annotated Dagur and Alsatian corpora are similar to those of typologically related languages in UD v2.12, laying the foundations for experimenting with zero-shot transfer approaches for automatic POS tagging. We evaluate some simple noise reduction strategies for POS tagging using the example of the Alsatian dialects and relying on their proximity to standard German. The results obtained confirm the important role of linguistic proximity in automatic POS tagging and the effectiveness of the proposed data transformation method. However, they also invite further interpretation of the capacities of multilingual models. (shrink)

Many studies have documented a close timing relationship between speech prosody and co-speech gesture, but some studies have not, and it is unclear whether these differences in speech-gesture alignment are due to different speaking tasks, different target gesture types, different prosodic elements, different definitions of alignment, or even different languages/speakers. This study contributes to the ongoing effort to elucidate the precise nature of the gesture–speech timing relationship by examining an understudied variety of American English, i.e., academic-lecture-style speech, with a focus (...) on an understudied type of gesture: Non-Referential gestures, which make up the majority of this corpus. Results for the 1,334 Stroke-Defined Gestures in this 20-min sample suggest that the stroke phase of a Non-Referential gesture tends to align with a pitch-accented syllable, just as reported in studies of other gesture types (e.g., deictic gestures) and in other speaking styles (such as narration). Preliminary results are presented suggesting that trajectory shapes of these Non-Referential gestures are consistent across a higher-level prosodic grouping, supporting earlier proposals for kinematic constancy across spoken prosodic constituents ( Kendon, 1972, 1980, 2004 ). Analysis also raises the possibility that the category of Non-Referential gestures is not solely made up of ‘beats,’ defined as simple bi-phasic flick-like movements that beat out the rhythm of the speech, but includes gestures with multiple phases and various types of rhythmicity. Taken together, the results of this analysis suggest (1) a wide range of gesture configurations within the undifferentiated category of Non-Referential gestures or ‘beats,’ which requires further investigation, and (2) a close coordination between co-speech gestures and the prosodic structure of spoken utterances across speaking styles and gesture referentiality, which has profound implications for modeling the process of planning an utterance. (shrink)

The linguistic complexity of words has largely been studied on the behavioral level and in experimental settings. Only little is known about the neural processes underlying it in uninstructed, spontaneous conversations. We built up a multimodal neurolinguistic corpus composed of synchronized audio, video, and electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings from the fronto-temporo-parietal cortex to address this phenomenon based on uninstructed, spontaneous speech production. We performed extensive linguistic annotations of the language material and calculated word complexity using several numeric parameters. We orthogonalized the (...) parameters with the help of a linear regression model. Then, we correlated the spectral components of neural activity with the individual linguistic parameters and with the residuals of the linear regression model, and compared the results. The proportional relation between the number of consonants and vowels, which was the most informative parameter with regard to the neural representation of word complexity, showed effects in two areas: the frontal one was at the junction of the premotor cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and Brodmann area 44. The postcentral one lay directly above the lateral sulcus and comprised the ventral central sulcus, the parietal operculum and the adjacent inferior parietal cortex. Beyond the physiological findings summarized here, our methods may be useful for those interested in ways of studying neural effects related to natural language production and in surmounting the intrinsic problem of collinearity between multiple features of spontaneously spoken material. (shrink)

Quotatives have been studied extensively in the language of teenagers in recent years as they present distinctive features of their own that make them different in part from those used by adults in mainstream English and Spanish. However, zero quoting has not received all the attention it certainly deserves as it has not been fully probed in terms of its discourse and pragmatic functions. This corpus-based study is focused on the strategies used by British and Spanish teenagers to introduce constructed (...) dialogue without the use of a particular marked and an explicit quotative form. The results indicate that the absence of quotatives is not casual; there are some linguistic contexts that favor the existence of this type of quotatives, namely non-lexicalized and sound words, and the dramatic recreation of situations where the speaker perform new voices. The lack of quotatives also serves to involve the interlocutor more directly and in a higher degree in what is being told, and gives more self-assurance to the narrator. These tendencies apply equally to English and Spanish. The study of null/zero quotatives should go then beyond the simple reporting of an absence of a verbal mark, and should address pragmatic and interpersonal factors closely associated with the context where they occur and with the speaker’s attitude and communicative intention and purpose. (shrink)

Small corpora remain an important resource for addressing questions requiring specialized data not found in large general purpose corpora. But do these small corpora have sufficient data to analyze low-frequency phenomena? This article presents a case study of the try-and-V pseudocoordination construction in English, which has an unusual morphosyntactic restriction: neither verb can be inflected. Diachronic corpora elucidate its origin as reanalysis from ambiguous usage of non-finite verbs in the late 1500s. Dialectal corpora reveal variation in frequency but not grammatical (...) properties. And child language corpora reveal productive usage even by young children. These results are considered successful and the outlook is optimistic for addressing low-frequency phenomena beyond contemporary, standard English, especially as more, and more diverse, corpora become available. (shrink)

The trend to centralization of the Mizrahi narrative has become an integral part of the nationalistic, ethnic, religious, and ideological-political dimensions of the emerging, complex Israeli identity. This trend includes several forms of opposition: strong opposition to "melting pot" policies and their ideological leaders; opposition to the view that ethnicity is a dimension of the tension and schisms that threaten Israeli society; and, direct repulsion of attempts to silence and to dismiss Mizrahim and so marginalize them hegemonically. The Mizrahi Democratic (...) Rainbow [The Keshet], the most prominent proponent and representative of this trend, was established in the 1990s with the intention of being a leading civic and political body in Israeli society. While it was the Mizrahi worldview that led to selection of the organization's name and aims, their vision was to be involved in social struggle on behalf of other groups in Israeli society. Since it was established, The Keshet has aimed to function as an assertive, long-term alternative coalition exerting influence, power, and pressure on the Israeli narrative network. And, indeed, the organization has succeeded in disrupting Israeli discourse, principally, by challenging the ideological foundations of the Zionist meta-narrative. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century and nearly a decade since it was established, The Keshet not only represents the most current wave of Mizrahi discourse, it has changed it to such a great degree that it is impossible to ignore its influence. Further, this alternative narrative may have significant potential to advance the internal Jewish discourse so fundamental at this time given the changing Israeli situation and regional conditions. And, while it is possible to view The Keshet and this new narrative as a continuation of the Mizrahi struggle, as a narrative The Keshet's agenda represents a post-colonial perspective and multi-cultural alternative to Zionism as a social vehicle. Amidst all of this, The Keshet continues to offer concrete proposals to change the Jewish character of the state as well as its internal and external relations. One of the primary goals of this study was to examine the rise of the Mizrahi narrative over the last two decades and the new Mizrahi discourse in Israeli society. More specifically, the study sought to attain an in-depth understanding of the central narrative created and represented by The Keshet. An additional goal was to investigate the influence of The Keshet's activity and the narrative it constructed in regard to other narratives. In particular, the study focused on The Keshet's opposition to the central Zionist narrative that infuses civic, political, and academic frameworks in Israel. Accordingly, the primary research questions investigated in the study sought to determine: What has been the influence of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow on the Mizrahi narrative in Israel? And, what are implications of such influence for the central Zionist narrative? Methodologically, the study was based on narrative and comparative analyses of texts from different periods of the older and newer Mizrahi narratives. The corpus included two types of texts: First, academic texts and opinion pieces, both philosophical and programmatic in nature, published in magazines, journals, books, as well as position papers; second, all of the texts published by prominent and influential figures who charted the path of The Keshet or led it organizationally and/or intellectually over the last twenty years (e. g., Yehudah Shenhav, Yossi Yona, Moshe Krief among others). All texts were examined by means of philosophical, historical and critical hermeneutic tools. This analysis revealed different levels of Mizrahi and civic discourse in Israel as well as among The Keshet's founders and leading ideologues. The study was based on a three stage process model, developed for purposes of this study, for investigation and analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative as well as other oppositional narratives, in particular opposition to the hegemonic meta-narrative. The stages are: issuing the challenge, dissolution and, liberation; that is, liberation is the measure of the ultimate success of the struggle for narrative change. Such change is not based on success in the field, but rather on a radical, fundamental reversal of thought, discourse patterns, stylistic structures, as well as forms of questioning - in this case of taken-for-granted racist mechanisms. However, the principal change is in achieving a deep, inner de-legitimization of the signifiers, categories, and reproductions of all manner of mockery that are based on immoral colonialist processes that are reinforced by regimes of fear and intimidation whose self-destruction began upon their very creation. This three stage model charts the course of the oppositional Mizrahi narrative from: accounting for the past (passing judgment on the so-called historic colonialist Zionism) to writing a new (pure Mizrahi) history and creation of a Mizrahi-Arab identity separate from the Ashkenazic, identified as Zionist. Contemporary post-colonialist discourse is integral in these stages. Such a perspective has been transformed by transitions from - binarism to hybridity, Orientalism to Occidentalism, the politics of "liberation" to "constructive" politics, from the history of consciousness to the history of change, as well as from nationalist to post-nationalist questions. Fundamentally, according to this approach, political and other struggles for the emerging narrative of Mizrahi (or Arab) history seek to centralize it in society and weave it amidst the models of multiculturalism. Undertaken in parallel, the central characteristics of all these stages are borrowed from countries in which the need for national reconciliation led to renunciation of apartheid and racist policies and historical judgment of the hegemony supported by racist leaders. In addition, these three moves were undertaken in Keshet and its ideologues by means of substantive symbolic violence directed at the hegemonic Ashkenazic discourse, which included creation of hatred of it, use of stereotypes the opposite of oppressive discourse, and adoption of an arrogant point of view toward it. This stands in stark contrast to the claims of the self-proclaimed new Mizrahi stance of a discourse established on purely ethical grounds that sought to cleanse itself of these very same oppressive elements. The model developed for and demonstrated in this study allows for analysis of oppositional narratives in which the libratory stage evolves into a form of entrapment, as appears to be occurring to the new Mizrahi discourse. This conclusion is based on the observations shared by many Keshet proponents including leading intellectuals who worked on the manifestos that were the subject of criticism from the Zionist camp. The study identified and defined the following six interwoven strata, which for purposes of explication are each discussed in a separate chapter: The first chapter presents a general theoretical discussion of the issue of the narrative and the inter-narrative struggle that has become central and applicable in various ways in the latest generation (e. g., anthropologically, hermeneutically, and philosophically). The analysis surveys different discussions in the inter-narrative struggle and locates them in the contexts, relations, and meanings derived from, representing, and indeed reproducing the narrative of national identity. The second chapter includes a historical survey of the older Mizrahi struggle that existed prior to the ascendance of the new Mizrahi narrative. Initially, Mizrahi discourse focused on expressing the ethnic protest that grew in years to follow. These feelings of discrimination and social distancing of the immigrants from Islamic countries gave birth to expressions of protest, the most prominent of which were Wadi Salib and the Black Panther Movement's various activities. The research literature contains many explanations for the exacerbation of the ethnic problem and creation of a situation that could not be ignored. The consensus academic view reached at the end of the 1970s identified a number of primary factors for this situation: the existence and extensive numbers of different ethnic groups; the relative or absolute segregation of frameworks within which members of these ethnic groups lived and acted; and the significant overlap between socio-economic status and feelings of discrimination retained by members of the Mizrahi group due years of neglect by the Ashkenazic establishment, the strengthening of Mizrahi social, cultural, and political power, as well as the emergence of a Mizrahi elite that identified with Mizrahi problems. The severe consequences of feelings of discrimination were expressed in a long series of events, such as: rioting by residents of the Rehovot Sharayim neighborhood in 1956; events of Wadi Salib in Haifa in 1959; and a chain of activities involving the Black Panthers in the 1970s. Protest was also an aspect of the "tent movement" in the 1970s and 1980s. Political activities were advanced by the Tami Movement that competed in the election for the 10th Knesset in 1981 and the Shas Movement that has continued to garner political power since being found in 1984. The 1980s and 1990s were characterized as the era of radical consciousness of Mizrahi discourse as well as by the rise to power, in consecutive order, of the political parties – Tami, Shas, and the Mizrahim HaHadashim [the New Mizrahi]. The latter party laid the foundations of the new radical Mizrahi discourse from which emerged such cultural activities as: Iton Aher [A Different Newspaper]; Bimat Kivon Aher [Another Direction Forum]; Efir'yon journal; the Halah Organization for Education in Neighborhoods, Development Towns, and Villages; Kedma; the newspaper – Patish [Hammer]; and, eventually the establishment of Keshet. The third chapter presents an examination of the materialization of the inter-narrative struggle in the case of Israel, with a specific focus on The Keshet and the new Mizrahi narrative advanced by it and intellectuals. The Keshet ideology is examined in the context of its grounding in post-colonial thought, especially that of Edward Said; the directions proposed by Ella Shohat and her followers; the central thinkers of the narrative in Israel in the last decade; and the harsh critique leveled at the Ashkenazic-Zionist narrative. The practical steps proposed for implementation within the multicultural model are also examined. Here the effort to reduce the centrality of Zionism while revealing its oppressive mechanisms was undertaken in parallel with use of these mechanisms in order to create a Mizrahi space with broad margins inclusive of alternative forms of Israeli identity in the Middle East and in conjunction with Arabs within and beyond Israel. Mizrahi traditionalism is examined in the fourth chapter in two particular respects. First, the criticism of the new Mizrahi narrative leveled by the renewed view and, second, the implications of the alternative in terms of creating a Mizrahi space that does not oppose Zionism. Rather, in opposing the post-colonialist perspective, this renewed traditionalist perspective criticizes as well as values Zionism. This space seeks to be both Jewish and Mizrahi. It does not detach itself from nationalist Zionism but rather views itself as a continuation of this tradition and, accordingly, is an effort to develop a next stage in its development. For example, an essential dimension of the traditionalist perspective, "commitment," is considered in this stage to be a fertile basis for dialogue with the past and as an anchor for contemporary interpretation of Mizrahi and other Jews' identities in Israel. The fifth and sixth chapters deal with all of the vectors of criticism directed at the new Mizrahi narrative, including its ideological foundations, philosophical stance, as well as intellectual and practical basis in the Israeli sphere in the face of Palestinian nationalism. These vectors of criticism from within and beyond The Keshet deal with issues, such as, the meaning of the movement's activities and the narrative that it offers regarding questions of Israeli identity, Israeli collective memory, and Mizrahi self-perception. At the same time, it must confront the capitalist neo-liberal narrative in a global world and thrive in a context in which it must make itself manifest amidst oppositional narratives. The final chapter presents a comprehensive, critical analysis of the new Mizrahi narrative. It does so by means of a theoretical model that examines it as an oppositional narrative – one that seeks to challenge the hegemonic meta-narrative, to dissolve the boundaries of the narrative discourse, and to propose liberation and redemption that may led to entrapment amidst a changing, a-dichotomous realities (e. g., global economic development in the face of Zionist nationalisms that display ideological strength as well as development of the sense of being an Israeli that maintains its vitality and continuity while being constituted by sectors that challenge being a Mizrahi, such as co-ethnic subjects. The Keshet's influence is dramatic and extends in a number of central directions. Its political activity and non-entry into the domains of the Israeli parliament granted the movement significant power in civic discourse and contributed to changing the persona of the Mizrahi discourse; for example, from political-party struggles over budgets and obtaining shares of the regime to changing the face of Israeli society and the centrality of the Mizrahi narrative. This change included deconstructing the Ashkenazic narrative and constructing comprehensive Ashkenazic-Zionist guilt, as evident in the Ehud Barak's request for collective forgiveness. This was accomplished through the participation of leading members of Keshet who appeared in prominent intellectual forums and engaged in lively discourse - principally in academic, social, and media domains. Such participation gave new meaning to various aspects of Israeli society while establishing different models of multiculturalism. The rise of the new Mizrahi narrative is a significant marker in the inter-narrative struggle as it represents a desire for separate or hybrid identities. And, the deep probing of the narrative constructed by leaders of The Keshet and those who identify with the movement produced a number of clear ways to distinguish it from the old Mizrahi struggle, whose history was portrayed through social protests, in a manner similar to linear vectors marked with wars and elections. The old Mizrahi struggle selected the traditional tactical struggle identified usually with social and political movements that seek to change political, social, and economic reality - from the bottom up. Their primary demand was to change decisions as well as the division of social goods and resources. Hence, this older period of struggle was not aimed at opposing the ideological foundations of the hegemonic narrative nor did it seek to undermine in a radical manner the unique nature of the state of Israel as a revolutionary solution for the problems of the Jews according to the Zionist approach, as a national home for the Jewish people, and recognition of the right to an preferred and meta-definition of Jewish nationalism. In contrast, the top down struggle advanced by the new narrative is part of an ideological movement led by the educated that is assertive and ground in post-colonialist theory. Accordingly, it was critical of the techniques and mechanisms of oppression as well as sought to attack the Zionist ideological foundations and to reveal its racist operations and the regimes that have preserved it so efficiently for many years. The uniqueness of this narrative is the intellectual offensive that continues to be advanced and, in parallel, development of the discourse struggle in Israel concerning the justification for Zionism and the concrete political proposal that Jews reject the taken-for-granted status of it as an ideology. This new narrative recognizes the historic difficulties of subversion as an emancipatory and, principally, moral effort. In addition, the new Mizrahi narrative shares the foundations and narrative of Palestinian victimization. In its radical version, the new Mizrahi narrative seeks to connect to the Palestinian narrative in order to create a new space here. According to this version, this action will take place gradually. The first stage will be characterized by opposition to Western European, Ashkenazic Zionism. The Eurocentric Zionism will surrender in the second stage, to be followed in the last stage by creation of a coalition of Jews and Arabs that will be establish through concrete actualization of the refugee status and victimization that is shared by both Palestinians and Mizrahim (whether as Mizrahim or Jewish-Arab). Not a speculative academic exercise, the goal sought by this narrative is delineate and to achieve a multicultural model in which equality, liberty, and social justice will overcome the nationalism and colonialism of either side; that is it will be neither Zionist nor Jewish. Thus, this approach stresses what is shared (e.g., acceptance of the Arab space and not a rejection of it; the legitimacy of the Arab language and culture). This is part of detachment from and historic judgment of the colonialist Zionist enterprise. This possibility includes moral elements that remove the evil and harm caused by Zionism for many years as well as inner cleansing – primarily among Ashkenazim – of attitudes towards Jews and non-Jews. Though, in this regard, it should be noted that, to date, the new narrative has not made similar claims that Palestinians undergo a similar process. The assumption seems to be that this should be tested, that the coalition proposed is a possibility that will be recognized by the Palestinians, and that they are prepared to undergo a similar, shared moral process that involves negating the state of Israel as a Jewish, Western state, a state of the Jewish people, and not only for those who live within it. These Mizrahi thinkers conducted a significant move through deconstruction and substitution of the Eurocentric narrative with a multi-cultural proposal that is optimistic and even attractively naïve. Today, they acknowledge that they did not take into account Palestinian nationalist violence directed to citizens, the traditionalist alternative, and widespread opposition within the Mizrahi community toward what is perceived to be Mizrahi seclusion. They also did not take into account the harsh criticism rendered by young and educated Mizrahim who claim that they were born into a complex, multi-dimensional, multi-layered identity that includes internalization of the language of the West and rules of the game of this complex identity. And, though they are critical of some of its values, this makes it difficult to mount internal emotional opposition to the West and to the globalization contained within this world. Hence, this more familiar world is preferred over the values of the Mizrahi-Arab alternative, particularly in regard to problems in the domains of democratic citizenship, stance taken toward women, and freedom of speech. Further, educated Mizrachim reject the post-colonialist perspective and are stridently critical of its dichotomization. They claim that such a division is irrelevant in a world in which older ideologies have collapsed and new spheres – such as cyberspace and others – are open to them in which they can present themselves with an Israeli identity that is not categorized as necessarily Mizrahi. (shrink)

That uses of language not only can, but even normally do have the character of actions was a fact largely unrealised by those engaged in the study of language before the present century, at least in the sense that there was lacking any attempt to come to terms systematically with the action-theoretic peculiarities of language use. Where the action-character of linguistic phenomena was acknowledged, it was normally regarded as a peripheral matter, relating to derivative or non-standard aspects of language which (...) could afford to be ignored. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of poisoning public political (...) discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

Words in Semitic texts often consist of a concatenation of word segments, each corresponding to a Part-of-Speech (POS) category. Semitic words may be ambiguous with regard to their segmentation as well as to the POS tags assigned to each segment. When designing POS taggers for Semitic languages, a major architectural decision concerns the choice of the atomic input tokens (terminal symbols). If the tokenization is at the word level the output tags must be complex, and represent both the segmentation of (...) the word and the POS tag assigned to each word segment. If the tokenization is at the segment level, the input itself must encode the different alternative segmentations of the words, while the output consists of standard POS tags. Comparing these two alternatives is not trivial, as the choice between them may have global effects on the grammatical model. Moreover, intermediate levels of tokenization between these two extremes are conceivable, and, as we will aim to show, beneficial. To the best of our knowledge, the problem of tokenization for POS tagging of Semitic languages has not been addressed before in full generality. In this paper, we study this problem for the purpose of POS tagging of Modern Hebrew texts. After extensive error analysis of the two simple tokenization models, we propose a novel, linguistically-motivated, intermediate tokenization model that gives better performance for Hebrew over the two initial architectures. Our study is based on the well-known Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We start out from a manually devised morphological analyzer and a very small annotated corpus, and describe how to adapt an HMM-based POS tagger for both tokenization architectures. We present an effective technique for smoothing the lexical probabilities using an untagged corpus, and a novel transform for casting the segment-level tagger in terms of a standard, word-level, HMM implementation. The results obtained using our model are on par with the best published results on Modern Standard Arabic, despite the much smaller annotated corpus available for Modern Hebrew.. (shrink)

Cet article rend compte d’une expérience pédagogique consistant à proposer à des étudiants de 2e année en orthophonie de constituer leur propre corpus de productions orales ou multimodales (enregistrement audio ou vidéo et transcription de cet enregistrement). Il met en évidence un certain nombre de questionnements auxquels cet exercice conduit les étudiants et souligne les liens avec leur pratique future.

The aim of this research is to analyze the political discourse and the language they used in public addresses provided by two former presidents of the United States, specifically, President Barak Obama and President Donald Trump. This research reflects on the material that has been collected for several months which aimed to contribute on the analysis of the corpus, distinctions and similarities, as well as their attitudes towards the public opinion. The objectives of this study are mainly empirical and theoretical. (...) Considering the empirical objectives, this study seeks to explore, identify and categorize the most used words in a political speech according to the categories, form, function and meaning, whereas, the theoretical objectives of this study are to provide a description of the language that is used in major events from well-known politicians when aiming to capture people’s attention. Their rhetorical habits were examined, in every delivery of Mr. Obama’s political speech; his speeches were carefully and well-articulated throughout his 8 year political service in the oval office, portraying him as a kind person. On the other hand, Mr. Trump’s, as a non-politician, more as a businessman, political speeches throughout his campaign and 4 years in the office were very often seen as aggressive, unforeseen, and nonetheless straight to the point. This study covers the linguistic level analysis as well as semantic and pragmatic levels. Initially, the selected corpora were analyzed using the Ant Conc software regarding frequency of usage and then move into detailed analysis. (shrink)

We outline an unsupervised language acquisition algorithm and offer some psycholinguistic support for a model based on it. Our approach resembles the Construction Grammar in its general philosophy, and the Tree Adjoining Grammar in its computational characteristics. The model is trained on a corpus of transcribed child-directed speech (CHILDES). The model’s ability to process novel inputs makes it capable of taking various standard tests of English that rely on forced-choice judgment and on magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability. We report encouraging (...) results from several such tests, and discuss the limitations revealed by other tests in our present method of dealing with novel stimuli. (shrink)

The current study represents an integrated model of explicit and implicit offensive language taxonomy. First, it focuses on a definitional revision and enrichment of the explicit offensive language taxonomy by reviewing the collection of available corpora and comparing tagging schemas applied there. The study relies mainly on the categories originally proposed by Zampieri et al. (2019) in terms of offensive language categorization schemata. After the explanation of semantic differences between particular concepts used in the tagging systems and the analysis of (...) theoretical frameworks, a finite set of classes is presented, which cover aspects of offensive language representation along with linguistically sound explanations (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al. 2021). In the analytic procedure, offensive from non-offensive discourse is first distinguished, with the question of offence Target and the following categorization levels and sublevels. Based on the relevant data generated from Sketch Engine (https://www.sketchengine.eu/ententen-english-corpus/), we propose the concept of offensive language as a superordinate category in our system with a number of hierarchically arranged 17 subcategories. The categories are taxonomically structured into 4 levels and verified with the use of neural-based (lexical) embeddings. Together with a taxonomy of implicit offensive language and its subcategorization levels which has received little scholarly attention until now, the categorization is exemplified in samples of offensive discourses in selected English social media materials, i.e., publicly available 25 web-based hate speech datasets (consult Appendix 1 for a complete list). The offensive category levels (types of offence, targets, etc.) and aspects (offensive language property clusters) as well as the categories of explicitness and implicitness are discussed in the study and the computationally verified integrated explicit and implicit offensive language taxonomy proposed in the study. (shrink)

We propose a set theory, called NRFST, in which the Cantorian axiom of infinity is negated, and a new notion of infinity is introduced via non standard methods, i. e. via adequate notions of standard and internal, two unary predicates added to the language of ZF. After some initial results on NRFST, we investigate its relative consistency with respect to ZF and Kawai's WNST.

Many languages have logophoric pronouns which refer to the person whose speech, thoughts or feelings are being reported, and some languages also have antilogophoric pronouns. This paper investigates logophoricity in the pronominal system of Finnish, in particular in reported speech and free indirect discourse. I first show that the referential patterns exhibited of two types of third person pronouns in Finnish – the human third-person pronoun hän and the non-human third person pronoun se, which can also be used for human (...) antecedents in certain contexts – seem to be very different in reported speech vs. FID contexts. However, I argue that the hän/se variation can be derived from a basic generalization – namely that hän refers to SELF New reflections on grammaticalization. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp 327–344, 2002) – as long as we take into account the size of the logophoric domain and the different defaults of standard Finnish and colloquial Finnish. Furthermore, I suggest that we do not need to posit an additional association between se and NON-SELF, because the referential behavior of se can be derived from the size of the logophoric domain and the register defaults. In addition, once we look at how these two pronominal forms interact with the demonstrative pronoun tämä in Finnish, it becomes clear that theories of reference resolution need to consider both logophoricity and salience. (shrink)

This paper presents a comprehensive Tag set as a fundamental component for developing an automated Word Class/part-of-speech (PoS) tagging system for the Arabic language. The aim is to develop a standard and comprehensive PoS tag set that based upon PoS classes and Arabic inflectional morphology useful for Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) developers to extract more linguistic information from it. The tag names in the developed tag set uses terminology from Arabic tradition grammar rather than English grammar. The usability (...) of the presented Tag set has been tested in manual tagging and built up a set of tagged text to serve as a goal corpus used to compare it with the results obtained from the tagger. The tagger has achieved an average accuracy of 90% using the developed detailed tag set. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.2 (2004) 279-283 [Access article in PDF] J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain, eds. Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. x + 483 pp. Cloth, $98. There are some issues, and bilingualism is one of them, that have been mainstays in the scholarly dialogue of classicists and historical linguists for centuries. This interest has (...) been fueled in part by the frequent references to Greek/Latin bilingualism in the ancient record, especially in connection with what Adams (Bilingualism and the Latin Language, 9) calls "élite bilinguals," i.e., upper-class Romans who were skilled in Greek. For example, Quintilian (1.1.12) says: "a sermone Graeco puerum incipere malo, quia Latinum, qui pluribus in usu est, vel nobis nolentibus perbibet." Cicero (Verr. 4.127), attacking Verres for his lack of cultivation, has the following harsh words: "tum epigramma Graecum pernobile incisum est in basi, quod iste eruditus homo et Graeculus, qui haec subtiliter iudicat, qui solus intellegit, si unam litteram Graecam scisset, certe non sustulisset." There is a notable passage in Gellius (17.17.1; commentary by Skutsch, The Annals of Q. Ennius, Oxford 1975, 749-50) in which he affirms the proficiency of Ennius in Greek, Latin and Oscan, and that of the famed king Mithridates, who was said to be fluent in twenty-five different languages ("Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret. Mithridates autem... quinque et viginti gentium quas sub dicione habuit linguas percalluit").But as is the case with many everyday commonsense notions, bilingualism is far more complex, and far more interesting, than has been thought previously. Bilingual societies have to some extent been unappreciated and have certainly been underanalyzed by scholars of the ancient world. The reasons are obvious but merit restatement: although bilingualism in ancient societies was an everyday fact of life, most of them did not have "language policies" governing the use of languages in particular social settings and therefore offer no scholarly or administrative discourse on the matter. Furthermore, the study of ancient bilingualism depends crucially on the existence of certain kinds of (bilingual) materials, a knowledge of the languages in question (not only Greek and Latin), and on subtle sociolinguistic notions, which are generally not in the repertoire of the literary or historical scholar, or the historical linguist.But this is all beginning to change, as scholars of antiquity begin to discover the features—psychological, sociological, and linguistic—that defined bilingual societies. Work has appeared recently by Indo-Europeanists conversant in dialectology and sociolinguistic principles: see, for example, Neumann and [End Page 279] Untermann, Die Sprachen im Römischen Reich der Kaiserzeit (Cologne 1980); Campanile, Cardona, and Lazzeroni, eds., Bilinguismo e biculturalismo nel mondo antico (Pisa 1988); and Dunkel, "Remarks on Code-Switching in Cicero's Letters to Atticus" (Museum Helveticum 57, 2000). There is also work by classical philologists who have applied the methods and approaches of sociolinguistics, such as Flobert, e.g., "Les grafittes de La Graufesenque; Un témoinage sur le gallo-latin sous Néron," in Iliescu and Marxgut, eds., Latin vulgaire-latin tardif iii (Tübingen 1992), and in this volume; and Biville, e.g., "Compétence bilingue latino-grecque et manipulations interlinguistiques," in La Koiné grecque antique, vol. 3 (Nancy 1998), also in this volume; and especially the recent massive volume by Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge 2003).The volume under review results from a conference held at the University of Reading in 1998. There are fifteen chapters, including a useful introductory essay by the editors. The introductory chapter is an important one for the classicist, since it contains discussion and explanation of many technical concepts that are central to the study of bilingual individuals and societies. The book contains two methodological essays in the introduction (D. L. Langslow, "Approaching Bilingualism in Corpus Languages"; and K. Versteegh, "Dead or Alive? The Status of the Standard Language"); four chapters on Greek-Latin bilingualism (F. Biville, "The Graeco-Romans and Graeco-Latin: A... (shrink)

Research investigating listeners’ neural sensitivity to speech sounds has largely focused on segmental features. We examined Australian English listeners’ perception and learning of a supra-segmental feature, pitch direction in a non-native tonal contrast, using a passive oddball paradigm and electroencephalography. The stimuli were two contours generated from naturally produced high-level and high-falling tones in Mandarin Chinese, differing only in pitch direction ( Liu and Kager, 2014 ). While both contours had similar pitch onsets, the pitch offset of the falling contour (...) was lower than that of the level one. The contrast was presented in two orientations (standard and deviant reversed) and tested in two blocks with the order of block presentation counterbalanced. Mismatch negativity (MMN) responses showed that listeners discriminated the non-native tonal contrast only in the second block, reflecting indications of learning through exposure during the first block. In addition, listeners showed a later MMN peak for their second block of test relative to listeners who did the same block first, suggesting linguistic (as opposed to acoustic) processing or a misapplication of perceptual strategies from the first to the second block. The results also showed a perceptual asymmetry for change in pitch direction: listeners who encountered a falling tone deviant in the first block had larger frontal MMN amplitudes than listeners who encountered a level tone deviant in the first block. The implications of our findings for second language speech and the developmental trajectory for tone perception are discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to identify and analyze a set of challenges that are likely to be encountered when one embarks on fieldwork in linguistic communities that feature small, young, and/or non-standard languages with a goal to elicit big sets of rich data. For each challenge, we (i) explain its nature and implications, (ii) offer one or more examples of how it is manifested in actual linguistic communities, and (iii) where possible, offer recommendations for addressing it effectively. Our (...) list of challenges involves static characteristics (e.g., absence of orthographic conventions and how it affects data collection), dynamic processes (e.g., speed of language change in small languages and how it affects longitudinal collection of big amounts of data), and interactive relations between non-dynamic features that are nevertheless subject to potentially rapid change (e.g., absence of standardized assessment tools or estimates for psycholinguistic variables). The identified challenges represent the domains of data collection and handling, participant recruitment, and experimental design. Among other issues, we discuss population limits and degree of power, inter- and intraspeaker variation, absence of metalanguage and its implications for the process of eliciting acceptability judgments, and challenges that arise from absence of local funding, conflicting regulations in relation to privacy issues, and exporting large samples of data across countries. Finally, the ten experimental challenges presented cover a broad typological spectrum, encompassing both spoken and sign, extant and nearly extinct languages. (shrink)

The available evidence indicates that the music of a culture reflects the speech rhythm of the prevailing language. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) is a measure of durational contrast between successive events that can be applied to vowels in speech and to notes in music. Music–language parallels may have implications for the acquisition of language and music, but it is unclear whether native-language rhythms are reflected in children's songs. In general, children's songs exhibit greater rhythmic regularity than adults' songs, (...) in line with their caregiving goals and frequent coordination with rhythmic movement. Accordingly, one might expect lower nPVI values (i.e., lower variability) for such songs regardless of culture. In addition to their caregiving goals, children's songs may serve an intuitive didactic function by modeling culturally relevant content and structure for music and language. One might therefore expect pronounced rhythmic parallels between children's songs and language of origin. To evaluate these predictions, we analyzed a corpus of 269 English and French songs from folk and children's music anthologies. As in prior work, nPVI values were significantly higher for English than for French children's songs. For folk songs (i.e., songs not for children), the difference in nPVI for English and French songs was small and in the expected direction but non-significant. We subsequently collected ratings from American and French monolingual and bilingual adults, who rated their familiarity with each song, how much they liked it, and whether or not they thought it was a children's song. Listeners gave higher familiarity and liking ratings to songs from their own culture, and they gave higher familiarity and preference ratings to children's songs than to other songs. Although higher child-directedness ratings were given to children's than to folk songs, French listeners drove this effect, and their ratings were uniquely predicted by nPVI. Together, these findings suggest that language-based rhythmic structures are evident in children's songs, and that listeners expect exaggerated language-based rhythms in children's songs. The implications of these findings for enculturation processes and for the acquisition of music and language are discussed. (shrink)

Fiction has been of concern to both the aesthetician and the ontologist. The former is concerned with the criteria or standards by which we judge the aesthetic worth of a fictional work, the latter with whether our ontology must be enlarged to include possible or imaginary worlds in which are housed the characters and incidents referred to and depicted in such works. This is a paper on the ontology of fiction. It will attempt to answer these ontological questions concerning truth (...) and reference in fiction by clarifying the use of language. Our paradigm case of the fictive use of language will be one in which the story-teller orally relates the fictional story in the presence of his audience, rather than one in which he inscribes his story so that it may be read at a later date. The value of considering the use of language in a face-to-face situation is that it brings before us in their full explicitness all of the different facets of a speech act, many of which often lie dormant in non-face-to-face uses and therefore are hard to discover from a consideration of such uses. (shrink)

BackgroundRandomized Controlled Trials are the gold standard for assessing whether an intervention is effective; however, they require large sample sizes in order to detect small effects. For rare or complex populations, we advocate a case series approach as a more realistic and useful first step for intervention evaluation. We consider the importance of randomization to such designs, and advocate for the use of Randomization Tests and Between Case Effect Sizes to provide a robust and statistically powerful evaluation of outcomes. In (...) this tutorial, we describe the method, procedures, and analysis code necessary to conduct robust single case series, using an empirical example with minimally verbal autistic children.MethodWe applied a pre-registered randomized baseline design with between-case effect size to a case series, to test the efficacy of a novel, parent-mediated, app-based speech production intervention for minimally verbal autistic children. Parent-rated probe scores were used to densely sample performance accuracy over time.ResultsParents were able to reliably code their children’s speech productions using BabbleBooster. A non-significant Randomization Test and small Between-Case Effect Size, suggested there was no evidence that BabbleBooster improved speech production in minimally verbal autistic children, relative to baseline scores, during this brief period of intervention.ConclusionThe current analyses exemplify a more robust approach to examining treatment effects in rare or complex populations, where RCT may be difficult or premature to implement. To facilitate adoption of this method by researchers and practitioners, we provide analysis code that can be adapted using open source R packages. Future studies could use this case series design to evaluate interventions aiming to improve speech and language outcomes for minimally verbal autistic children, and other heterogeneous and hard to reach populations. (shrink)

Linguistic repetitions in children are conceptualized as negative in children with autism – echolalia, without communicative purpose – and positive in typically developing (TD) children – linguistic alignment involved in shared engagement, common ground and language acquisition. To investigate this apparent contradiction we analyzed spontaneous speech in 67 parent–child dyads from a longitudinal corpus (30 minutes of play activities at 6 visits over 2 years). We included 32 children with autism and 35 linguistically matched TD children (mean age at recruitment (...) 32.76 and 20.27 months). We found a small number of exact repetitions in both groups (roughly 1% of utterances across visits), which increased over time in children with autism and decreased in the TD group. Partial repetitions were much more frequent: children reused caregivers' words at high rates regardless of diagnostic group (24% of utterances at first visit), and this increased in frequency (but not level) over time, faster for TD children (at final visit: 33% for autism, 40% for TD). The same happened for partial repetition of syntax and semantic alignment. However, chance alignment (as measured by surrogate pairs) also increased and findings for developmental changes were reliable only for syntactic and semantic alignment. Children with richer linguistic abilities also displayed a higher tendency to partially re–use their caregivers' language (alignment rates and semantic alignment). This highlights that all children commonly re–used the words, syntax, and topics of their caregivers, albeit with some quantitative differences, and that most repetition was at least potentially productive, with repeated language being re–contextualized and integrated with non–repeated language. The salience of echolalia in ASD might be partially explained by slight differences in frequency, amplified by lower semantic alignment, persistence over time, and expectations of echolalia. More in–depth qualitative and quantitative analyses of how repetitions are used and received in context are needed. (shrink)

The main purpose of the paper is to find illuminating and fruitful definitions of ?standard use?, ?misuse?, ?misleading use?, etc., as applied to our speech. The author first sets up two fundamental conditions for successful standard use of language: (1) that the statement should be given in the right circumstances, including the speaker's having a status such that he can make a statement of the kind in question; (2) that the speaker should mean what he says, in the sense that (...) what he says is an unfeigned, genuine expression of his mind. If either of these conditions is not satisfied, the statement is to be classified as non?standard in some sense. But depending on whether or not the person addressed is aware of the fact that the condition is not satisfied, the statement will be classified in different ways. Thus, if condition 1 is not satisfied and the person addressed is aware of it, he should call it simply ?odd? use, sometimes ?nonsense?. However, if the person addressed is unaware of this fact, we should talk about ?misleading? use (e.g. if someone who is not in command gives a command; if someone who was not there tells about the event as if he were present). If condition 2 is not satisfied and the person addressed is aware of it, we get ?secondary? use (e.g. jokes, irony, quotation, politeness, flattery as an accepted part of the social game). However, if the person addressed is not aware of this fact, we get ?misuse? or ?parasitic? use (e.g. lying, boasting, bluffing, cajoling). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 719 Metaphor and Religious Language. By JANET MARTIN SosKICE. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985. Pp. 191. Cloth, $25.00. This book combines two excellent studies: the first is a critical analysis of theories of metaphor and topics in contemporary philosophy of language which are especially relevant to theories of metaphor; the second is an examination of the way in which models and the metaphorical language based on them (...) are understood in a critical realism concerning scientific explanation, and so can support the possibility of a critical realism in theology. The second study is premised on the first, but the first (Chapters I-V) can be read independently and is valuable in its own right whether or not the reader has theological concerns. Though the author's ultimate aim is to provide a defense of the "theist's right to make metaphysical claims" (a defense of "theological realism") by arguing for the "conceptual possibility" of a referential religious language (148), she is well aware that any adequate account of religious language has to be informed by a proper understanding of the variety of forms (literal and non-literal) our non-religious language takes. In particular, "no philosophical account of religious language will be either complete or sufficient if it fails to take account of the way forms of figurative discourse, like metaphor, function in the task of saying that which cannot be said in other ways " (63). The first five chapters of the book then are devoted to a detailed and comprehensive analysis of metaphor in ordinary language, beginning with classical accounts (Ch. 1), distinguishing metaphor both from non-linguistic entities and from other figures of speech (Chs. II and IV), and critically examining standard theories of metaphor (Ch. III) and issues concerning' metaphorical meaning,' 'metaphorical truth,' and the irreducibility of metaphor (Ch. V). Soskice begins (and ends) by defining metaphor as a "figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another" (15, 49) and argues for an "interanimative" account of metaphor (which is presented as a refinement of the insights of I. A. Richards). In relatively small compass she presents a formally comprehensive survey and critical analysis of competing theories of metaphor. The criticisms are simple, straightforward, and radical. For example, she concludes that, at bottom, emotive accounts are inadequate because " there must be some guiding cognitive features which the emotive response is the response to" (27). (This sort of consideration later figures in her criticism of accounts which see a merely affective role for models.) She argues that theories which see the heart of metaphor in a self-contradictory at- 7~0 BOOK REVIEWS tribution ignore those acknowledged metaphors which do not imply logical conflict, those metaphors which are such only because of context or intention; however, they fail adequately to distinguish such logical conflict from nonsense (32ff). Substitution theories and comparison theories fail to see that " the very thinking is undertaken in terms of the metaphor " (25)-there are not two things antecedently known. Here begins her criticism of a thesis-the 'two subjects' thesis-which underlies much theorizing about metaphor. The criticism is an important and sustained one; it is addressed to sophisticated versions of the potentially promising "interactive " accounts of metaphor, like Black's (46ff), and comes into play '..:1 her analysis of Ricoeur's work on metaphor (Ch. V). Though I have only pointed in a sketchy way to the kind of criticism the author offers of the major theories of metaphor, I should emphasize that her criticism is detailed, careful, and cogent, and engages in illuminating give-and-take with contemporary philosophical discussions of metaphor and related linguistic issues (a la Davidson, Searle, et al.). It is, moreover, presented with such clarity and helpful examples as to make it both an excellent introduction to the topic and a useful study for those with some familiarity with the contemporary debate. The " interanimative " theory of metaphor which Soskice proposes holds that metaphor is in an important sense 'two ideas for one,' though it does not involve a duality of reference. Metaphor is not generated simply by " conflict of meaning" or by " interaction of two... (shrink)

Most linguists have defined African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a regular and systematic form of vernacular language which contains distinctive grammatical and phonological features. AAVE is considered a social dialect or a non-standard variety of American English, which is spoken by the majority of African Americans. This article explores variability of the selected AAVE features in the interviews with ten African-American public figures, ranging from Hip Hop artists and blues musicians (Redman, Chuck D, Prodigy, MC Lyte, B.B. King) to talk (...) show hosts (Oprah Winfrey), from Hollywood actresses (Queen Latifah,Whoopi Goldberg) to former government officials (Colin Powell) and residents of the White House (Michelle Obama). The selected features of AAVE treated in this study include the absence of copula, the third person singular –s absence, the possessive –s absence, the plural –s absence, and the generalization of is and was to plural and second person pronouns.We consider the influence of social parameters (i.e., gender, age, social status, ethnicity, and affiliation with Hip Hop culture) on the degree of speech formality within a frame of interspeaker variation by examining the correlation between the frequencies of AAVE features and social factors of individual interviewees. The frequencies of individual AAVE variants are calculated into percentages which represent the levels of vernacular usage of each interviewee. Our results are then compared with the outcomes of previous sociolinguistic findings on external factors that have been reported to affect the degree of linguistic formality in a spoken discourse. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent legislation in Spain has transposed Directive 2010/64/EU, which recognises interpretation as an essential tool for safeguarding fairness in criminal proceedings, in particular, for preventing any state of defencelessness. Previous research, however, has suggested important deficiencies in court interpreting in this country. This article analyses court interpreting from Chinese to Spanish, based on a case study of a recording of a criminal trial that took place in Barcelona in February 2015. The trial was transcribed verbatim and annotated in accordance with (...) Cecilia Wadensjö’s distinction between “talk as text” and “talk as activity.” The analysis focuses on examples of errors of interpretation, speech style and non-renditions. The results are compared with those of a corpus of 55 court proceedings in which the interpretation was from Spanish to English and from French to Romanian. The article concludes with a discussion of the factors—s... (shrink)

The theory of speech acts put forward by Adolf Reinach in his "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law" of 1913 rests on a systematic account of the ontological structures associated with various different sorts of language use. One of the most original features of Reinach's account lies in hIs demonstration of how the ontological structure of, say, an action of promising or of commanding, may be modified in different ways, yielding different sorts of non-standard instances of the corresponding (...) speech act varieties. The present paper is an attempt to apply this idea of standard and modified instances of ontological structures to the realm of judgement and cognition, and thereby to develop a Reinachian theory of how intentionality is mediated through language in acts of thinking and speaking. (shrink)

Digital communication has generated forms of written speech that may deviate from standard ones, such as Greeklish (a Latin-alphabet-based script) vs. Greek. The question of interest is how different orthographic representations of the same referent (e.g. petaloyda, “butterfly”, in Greeklish vs. πϵταλούδα “butterfly” in Greek) may influence word processing, particularly visual word recognition and access to affective connotations. 120 Greek native speakers were tested on a lexical decision task, in which script (Greeklish vs. Greek) and valence (positive vs. negative vs. (...) neutral) were manipulated within participants. Words were matched for word class, frequency, concreteness, length, number of syllables and orthographic neighbourhood. Emotional words differed from neutral ones in valence and arousal. Results yielded faster response times for words written in the standard script (Greek) than the non-standard script (Greeklish). Moreover, regardless of script, response times were negatively correlated with the words’ valence, with slowest responses for negative words and fastest for positive ones, suggesting that positive content accelerates lexical access, whereas negative content slows it down. To sum up, although script type was found to affect word recognition, activation of and access to emotional content seemed to resist non-standard characteristics of visual word processing. (shrink)

This article proposes an analysis of the gestural production of people suffering from fluent or non-fluent aphasia in comparison with the gestures performed by speakers not suffering from any language disorder. The interest of such a study is twofold: firstly, it allows a better understanding of what happens to gestures during the numerous speech dysfluencies caused by the speech impairment. Among other things, it sheds light on the links between speech and gestures in multimodal face-to-face interaction. Despite the profusion of (...) work on aphasia, very little is still known about the characteristics of the gestures performed spontaneously by aphasic people. The study presented here is based on video examples from the AphasiaBank corpus to illustrate the specific features of the speech and gestures of atypical speakers and gives a more detailed description of the gestural production of people with aphasia. This knowledge can inform post-stroke rehabilitation procedures that rely on some form of multimodal speech therapy in order to adapt to the various communication needs of the patients. (shrink)

A popular way to relate probabilistic information to binary rational beliefs is the Lockean Thesis, which is usually formalized in terms of thresholds. This approach seems far from satisfactory: the value of the thresholds is not well-specified and the Lottery Paradox shows that the model violates the Conjunction Principle. We argue that the Lottery Paradox is a symptom of a more fundamental and general problem, shared by all threshold-models that attempt to put an exact border on something that is intrinsically (...) vague. We propose application of the language of relative analysis—a type of non-standard analysis—to formulate a new model for rational belief, called Stratified Belief. This contextualist model seems well-suited to deal with a concept of beliefs based on probabilities ‘sufficiently close to unity’ and satisfies a moderately weakened form of the Conjunction Principle. We also propose an adaptation of the model that is able to deal with beliefs that are less firm than ‘almost certainty’. The adapted version is also of interest for the epistemicist account of vagueness. (shrink)

This book argues that the major traditions in the philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals. Philosophers of language have focused primarily on highly idealized linguistic contexts in which cooperative agents are working toward the shared goal of gaining information about the world. This approach abstracts (...) away from important issues like power, ideology, social position, and diversity of goals which are crucial to explaining linguistic phenomena both at the semantic and pragmatic levels. This book begins by examining the work of some of the pioneers of this tradition--primarily David Lewis, Paul Grice, and Robert Stalnaker. The author shows that various problems have their source in idealizations made at the foundational level of linguistic theory and proposes to rebuild from the ground-up. She presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language which retains the major insights of traditional frameworks while rejecting the social idealizations that guide them. Then, she explores the social and political applications of her account to issues such as dog whistling, propaganda, slurs and racist speech, silencing, and manipulation. Non-Ideal Foundations of Language will appeal to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of language who are interested in the social and political applications of language, as well as traditional metasemantic theory. (shrink)

Resumen: En este trabajo, se observa la variación fonética del fonema oclusivo bilabial sonoro en el español no estándar en una muestra de hablantes chilenos de ocho ciudades, cuyas ubicaciones geográficas permiten cubrir los principales sectores urbanos del país. En los resultados se evidencia un marcado uso del alófono aproximante labiodental sonoro en este tipo de habla y un comportamiento relativamente homogéneo en todo el país respecto de las principales variantes del fonema oclusivo bilabial sonoro. La comparación del fonema oclusivo (...) bilabial sonoro entre el español no estándar y el estándar muestra marcadas diferencias, datos que sugieren un cambio lingüístico en proceso desde el alófono aproximante bilabial sonoro al alófono aproximante labiodental sonoro.: In this study, we observed the phonetic variation of voiced bilabial occlusive phoneme in non-standard Spanish in a sample of Chilean speakers from cities whose geographical locations allow to cover the main urban sectors of the country. The results that show a marked use of voiced labiodental approximant allophone in this type of speech an a relatively homogenous behaviour in the whole country of the main variants of the voiced bilabial occlusive phoneme are presented. The comparison of voiced bilabial occlusive phoneme between non-standard and standard Spanish shows clear differences, data that suggest a linguistic change in process from voiced bilabial approximant allophone to voiced labiodental approximant allophone. (shrink)

Although speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions, some are perceptually weighted more than others and there are residual effects of native-language weightings in non-native speech perception. Recent research on nonlinguistic sound category learning suggests that the distribution characteristics of experienced sounds influence perceptual cue weights: Increasing variability across a dimension leads listeners to rely upon it less in subsequent category learning (Holt & Lotto, 2006). The present experiment investigated the implications of this among native Japanese learning English /r/-/l/ (...) categories. Training was accomplished using a videogame paradigm that emphasizes associations among sound categories, visual information, and players’ responses to videogame characters rather than overt categorization or explicit feedback. Subjects who played the game for 2.5 h across 5 days exhibited improvements in /r/-/l/ perception on par with 2–4 weeks of explicit categorization training in previous research and exhibited a shift toward more native-like perceptual cue weights. (shrink)

Today, dignity recognized as a fundamental value across legal systems is equal, inherent and inalienable, inviolable, is the source of human rights and is essential for its subject to be recognized as an autotelic entity (an end in itself) that cannot be treated as an object. The analysis of the extract from Plato’s Demiurge’s speech in Timaeus reveals that Plato developed a reflection on something that determines the qualitative difference between certain beings and the world of things, and that forms (...) the basis for the special treatment of these beings, which the modern language can reasonably describe as dignity. The attributes of that dignity seem to overlap with the nature of dignity as we know today. What is more, Plato proposes a response to the question of what dignity is like but also to the question of what dignity is. It is the existential perfection, established in a perfect way of existence based on a specific internal unity of being. As the existential perfection, it covers the entire being along with all its features; it is inseparable from being (inherent and inalienable) – without it, it cannot exist. It is primordial to the particular features and independent of their acquisition or loss. Plato’s approach allows, based on the approach to dignity, the formulation of proposals aligned with today’s personalistic standards prescribing that persons be treated as ends in themselves and prohibiting the treatment of persons like objects. (shrink)

This commentary addresses the complexities of representation in sociolinguistic transcripts, considering the meaning potentials of different representational choices at the level of both ideology and identity. It considers the kinds of authenticity and evidence that are indexed by simplified versus more detailed transcripts, suggesting that a simplified transcript may give more direct access to elements of the original speaker's voice. Second, it discusses the role of transcripts as scholarly texts, and questions their use as sociolinguistic records suitable for reinterpretation by (...) scholars who do not have access to the original recordings. Third, it emphasizes that the use of non-standard orthographies is an unreliable source of data on sociolinguistic variation, because few authors use non-standard forms in consistent and principled ways. Fourth, it proposes that translations may take different forms depending on whether they are efforts to be `faithful' to `authentic' speech in the target versus the source language. Finally, it reflects on the act of transcription as part of professional practice and identity among linguists. (shrink)

RésuméL'analyse non‐standard fournit une base solide à la théorie des infinitésimaux. L'approche axiomatique qu'en donne Nelson est basée sur un nouveau predicat qui est ajouté au langage de la théorie usuelle des ensembles. Nous interprétons ce prédicat et formulons les axio‐mes de Nelson ?on;une façon qui peut être comparee à la discussion de P. R. Halmos dans son livre Naïve Set Theory .SummaryNon‐standard analysis gives a proper foundation to the theory of infinitesimals. Nelson's axiomatic approach of it uses a new (...) predicate which is added to the classical language of set theory. We interpret this new predicate and formulate Nelson's axioms in a way that can be compared to P. R. Halmos' discussion of set axioms in his book Naïve Set Theory .ZusammenfassungDie nicht‐standard Analyse liefert eine solide Grundlage für die Theorie der infinitesimalen Grössen. Die von Nelson vorgeschlagene Axiomatisierung beruht auf einem neuen Prädikat, das den in der Sprache der Mengentheorie üblichen hinzugefügt wird. Wir interpretieren dieses Prädikat und formulieren Nelsons Axiome auf eine Art, die mit der Diskus‐sion von P.R. Halmos in Naïve Set Theory verglichen werden kann. (shrink)