Dans le contexte d’une révision de l’élargissement de l’UE aux Balkans, la couverture médiatique du Monténégro, l’un des principaux acteurs de ce processus, dans la presse allemande est devenue plus présente ces dernières années. Cette recherche a pour but d’explorer les représentations du Monténégro dans quatre journaux allemands de premier plan. La contribution propose une approche d’analyse de données textuelles appliquée à un corpus composé d’articles consacrés au Monténégro entre 2016 et 2023. Grâce à des méthodes statistiques de texte (...) telles que le z-score et les calculs de cooccurrences, l’article explore l’interaction complexe des facteurs sociopolitiques, historiques et internationaux qui influencent l’image du pays dans la presse allemande. Les résultats révèlent des variations significatives dans les perspectives et les niveaux de représentation entre les journaux, ce qui est révélateur de leur position idéologique. Malgré sa taille géographique relativement modeste, le Monténégro suscite un niveau d’attention modéré dans ces journaux allemands, comme le montrent les marqueurs linguistiques identifiés par l’analyse statistique. En tant qu’étude pionnière, cet article contribue à une meilleure compréhension de la manière dont l’image et la perception de pays comme le Monténégro sont façonnées dans les contextes de la presse étrangère. (shrink)

Les coocurrences ont surtout servi jusqu’ici à établir les relations, principalement sémantiques, que les mots ont entre eux. On les relevait certes dans un corpus, mais de façon indifférenciée, sans opposer les textes les uns aux autres. Or la comparaison des textes est la démarche habituelle quand la lexicométrie s’occupe des mots simples. On se propose ici d’étendre aux données cooccurrentielles les méthodes et les outils statistiques qui ont fait leurs preuves au niveau lexical. New Statistical Processing of Co-occurences by (...) HYPERBASE. The co-occurrences have mainly been studied to establish semantic relations, i.e., the relation in-between words. Certainly, they use to be extracted from a corpus, but indiscriminately, without taking into consideration the text divisions. When dealing with simple words, the usual approach is the comparison of texts. Here, we propose to extend those methods, approved at the lexical level, and to enlarge the application of statistical tools even to co-occurrential data. (shrink)

Les arbres de mots constituent un des outils de la statistique textuelle pour visualiser les relations sémantiques entre mots d’un texte. Les méthodes de construction de ces arbres à partir d’une distance de co-occurrence dans le texte produisent des arbres dont les longueurs d’arêtes se prêtent mal à l’analyse. Pour faciliter l’interprétation visuelle de l’arbre, l’idéal serait que des longues arêtes séparent des classes sémantiques de mots. Ainsi, découper les arêtes les plus longues de l’arbre devrait conduire à une partition (...) de l’ensemble des mots qui fournit des classes pertinentes. A l’aide de deux corpus dont un sous-ensemble de mots a été partitionné en un ensemble de classes sémantiques, nous évaluons plusieurs formules permettant de recalculer les longueurs d’arêtes de l’arbre construit à partir des distances de co-occurrence, afin de rendre l’interprétation de l’arbre plus facile et plus fiable. (shrink)

Gallicagram est un nouvel outil de lexicométrie, fondé notamment sur les archives océrisées de la Bibliothèque nationale de France et sur celles du journal Le Monde ; il dénombre dans le corpus choisi et pour une période donnée les occurrences d’un mot ou d’un syntagme, et offre différents modes de visualisation des données obtenues. Ce logiciel mérite à plusieurs titres d’être investi par les chercheurs : outre le volume des données qu’il exploite, suffisant pour fonder des analyses lexicométriques depuis le (...) XVIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, Gallicagram a sur son concurrent immédiat, Ngram Viewer, l’avantage d’une transparence très supérieure et d’une structure plus constante au cours du temps. L’article présente Gallibase, son extension qui lui applique les outils de la statistique textuelle – en particulier les analyses factorielles et arborées. Il illustre son potentiel et insiste sur l’intérêt spécifique des corpus de presse, qui permettent des études sur périodes courtes. (shrink)

Nous examinons ici les schémas lexico-grammaticaux (LG) associés à trois verbes supports (« effectuer », « réaliser », « procéder ») dans deux corpus juridiques comparables (un corpus de directives européennes rédigées en français et leur transposition en France dans les textes de lois). A cette fin, nous utilisons Le Trameur, un logiciel de textométrie qui permet une comparaison systématique des données textuelles en mobilisant plusieurs méthodes statistiques exploratoires : analyse des fréquences par partie, spécificités, segments répétés, co-occurrences, poly-cooccurrences, etc. (...) Le recours à ce type d’outils permet au linguiste d’élaborer des unités de base de son système analytique en suivant un protocole de recherche précis, qui tient compte des indices quantitatifs. Finalement, des distinctions lexico-grammaticales fines entre des lexèmes dont le sémantisme serait trop proche pour une comparaison hors contexte, sont visualisées de façon synthétique au fil du texte, tout en permettant de différentier certaines constructions spécifiques du français « eurolectal » et les éléments du discours technocratique « national ». (shrink)

This study examines linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of individuals with communication impairments who use augmentative and alternative communication devices in the workplace by comparing them to those of non-AAC users in similar job settings. A typical workweek per focal participant was recorded and transcribed to create a specialized corpus of workplace discourse of approximately 464,000 words at the time of this analysis. A multidimensional analysis of co-occurrence patterns along functional linguistic dimensions, following Biber [Variation across Speech and Writing. (...) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], reveals differences in the macro discourse characteristics of AAC vis-a-vis non-AAC texts. Results indicate that AAC texts make use of more informational, non-narrative, and explicit textual features of discourse than their non-AAC counterparts. Implications to improve the capabilities of AAC devices to produce speech that matches baseline expectations of co-workers in the workplace are discussed. (shrink)

Starting from the notion of a structural relation between war and rape in patriarchal systems, this article aims at pointing out how this relation is reflected in the co-occurrence of war and marriage metaphors in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis is combined with cognitive metaphor theory to show how metaphors of marriage and romance ("MERGERS ARE MARRIAGES") tend to co-occur with war and various derived metaphors ("M&As ARE BATTLES FOR TERRITORY"). The significance of these co-occurrences is illustrated (...) through corpus data from genres such as newspaper reports and journal articles. Results of additional qualitative analysis are drawn upon to investigate whether the well-established marriage metaphor functions as an ideologically invested euphemism for rape metaphors. Because the latter are more often than not conspicuously absent, the notion of metaphor gaps is introduced and discussed briefly. (shrink)

Hyperbase est un logiciel d’Analyse de Données Textuelles (ADT) qui offre une suite d’outils statistiques dédiés à l’étude de corpus. Initialement développé sur ordinateur de bureau, il se décline depuis 2015 en plateforme web offrant une interface à l’ergonomie travaillée pour un usage tourné vers les sciences humaines et sociales. Après un rappel méthodologique de l’ADT, cette contribution présente Hyperbase Web version 2024, à partir d’exemples concrets d’usages, de notes techniques ainsi que des entrées par le menu (manuel d’utilisateur). Cette (...) présentation sert de référence pour la prise en main du logiciel ou l’utilisation avancée des méthodes d’ADT. (shrink)

Cet article montre ce que la cooccurrence peut nous apprendre sur la monosémie et comment on peut exploiter l’analyse des cooccurrences de deuxième ordre pour quantifier l’analyse sémantique. Les analyses sont conduites sur un corpus technique (1,7 million d’occurrences) relevant du domaine spécialisé des machines-outils pour l’usinage des métaux. Dans cet article, nous expliquons la méthodologie adoptée pour déterminer le degré de monosémie d’un mot technique à partir de l’analyse du recoupement de ses cooccurrences de deuxième ordre. Dans le but (...) d’affiner les résultats de la mesure de recoupement, nous procédons également à quelques expérimentations qui vont au-delà du simple repérage statistique des cooccurrences et qui font varier différents paramètres, tels que la fenêtre d’observation, le seuil de significativité et la forme graphique ou le lemme des cooccurrences de premier et deuxième ordre. Finalement, nous abordons l’importance de l’intégration des étiquettes morphosyntaxiques dans l’analyse des cooccurrences. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse à la distribution et à la sémantisation des termes « féminisme » et « féministe » dans les discours de l’élection présidentielle de 2022. Grâce aux outils de la statistique occurrentielle et co-occurrentielle, le papier montre la percée lexicale de ces mots dans le champ électoral et le triomphe des deux signifiants en même temps que la continuation de dissensus, entre la gauche et l’extrême droite de l’échiquier politique, dans la prescription du sens des signifiés attachés.

Récurrente sous différentes formes dans le domaine de la lexicométrie, l’analyse cooccurrentielle vise à dévoiler les attractions lexicales qui opèrent dans un texte en restituant un état intermédiaire entre la séquence textuelle et l’inventaire lexical, état qui doit combiner l’explicitation syntagmatique de l’une avec la hiérarchisation statistique de l’autre. Pour dépasser les résultats des méthodes de cooccurrence classiques et identifier des systèmes cooccurrentiels plus complexes à l’oeuvre dans le texte, il s’avère nécessaire de substituer à l’approche analytique des associations lexicales (...) une vue synthétique de ces attractions prééminentes en contexte. (shrink)

En Europe, la recolonisation progressive des territoires par les grands carnivores, espèces protégées, fait l’objet de conflits virulents notamment dus à l’impact des actes de prédation sur les activités d’élevage. Les conflits provoqués par le retour du loup en France ont été abondamment relayés par la presse et ont ainsi été diffusés auprès d’un public élargi. À travers une mobilisation conjointe de méthodes de la lexicométrie et de l’analyse du discours, nous avons étudié l’évolution de l’image médiatique de l’éleveur (...) dans la presse régionale (Nice-Matin) et nationale (Le Monde) entre 1993 – date de première médiatisation du retour du loup – et 2014. Notre recherche témoigne d’une construction axiologique de cet acteur dans les deux quotidiens considérés. Tout au long de la période, Nice-Matin opère une légitimation de l’éleveur à travers la valorisation de son témoignage et de la profession qu’il exerce. La posture du quotidien national évolue quant à elle au cours du temps. Les premières années (1993-1999) sont marquées par un discours évaluant négativement la parole de l’éleveur et favorisant l’expertise institutionnelle. À partir du début des années 2000, marquées d’un point de vue institutionnel par l’autorisation de tirs de prélèvement dérogatoires de loups, Le Monde établit progressivement une image positive de l’éleveur et développe un discours empathique proche de celui de la presse régionale. En 2012, la publication d’un éditorial en faveur de la politique de régulation du loup inscrit explicitement un rapprochement entre les postures du journal et de l’institution. (shrink)

We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell’s inequality and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the (...) latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the ‘Cirel’son bound’ for all of the considered corpuses of documents. (shrink)

There are many different ways in which modern Corpus Linguistics can be used to enrich and broaden our understanding of legal discourse. Based on the central principle of co-occurrence and co-selection in language construction, this paper reviews current applications of Corpus Linguistics in the area of legal discourse focusing on issues ranging from phraseology, variation in legal discourse, legal translation, register and genre perspectives on legal discourse, legal discourse in forensic contexts to evaluative language in judicial settings. It revisits the (...) notion of ‘corpus’ and it highlights the relevance of various types of legal corpora and computer tools in legal linguistic research. (shrink)

This article reports on an inquiry that investigated the development of ba constructions in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of ba construction were extracted from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus collected from 168 preschoolers aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6. Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, University of Hong Kong. Data analysis indicated that: Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 11 types of ba construction, and the children in the youngest age group were able to produce six types of them; children at (...) 4 years old experienced a critical developmental period of pragmatic use, and at 5 years old they had attained cognitive and linguistic maturity in understanding the semantic and syntactic features of ba constructions; and there was a significant age effect on the production of three types of ba construction, but no significant association between the children’s gender and their production of ba constructions. These findings offer fresh insights into understanding Chinese children’s innate capacity to understand the co-occurrence constraints concerning the syntactic, semantic and verb features inherent in ba construction, and their developmental ability to denote telic events by resorting to the appropriate ba sentence patterns. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Since the United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union (EU) membership in 2016, a new political cleavage of Remainers and Leavers has developed (Kelley, N. [2019]. British social attitudes survey: Britain’s shifting identities and attitudes. (36). National Centre for Research). This paper explores how five pro-Brexit newspapers discursively construct political division in Britain in relation to two key events in the final year of Britain’s EU membership: the extension of the withdrawal process past the original date of March, and the (...) introduction of the Benn Act in September. The paper reveals two primary discursive constructions of division in Britain: a divide between incompetent and arrogant political officials and an innocent, suffering public, and an identity cleavage between pro-Remain ‘elites’ and ‘ordinary’ Leave-voting citizens. The study argues that the construction of these divisions threatens a collective national identity in Britain at a time when it is most required. It concludes that by apportioning blame for socio-political divisions, the newspapers obfuscate their role in contributing to disunity in the UK. (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)

Based on a corpus-driven analysis of two translated versions ofHongloumeng(one by David Hawkes and the other by Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang) in parallel corpora, this article investigates the use of lexical bundles in an attempt to trace the stylistic features and differences in the translations produced by the respective translators. TheHongloumengcorpus is developed at the sentence level to facilitate co-occurrence of the source texts and the two corresponding translations. For this purpose, the three-word and four-word lexical bundles were first (...) extracted and then analyzed with respect to the functional classification proposed by Biber et al. (2004). The results of the study show that Hawkes' translation is embedded with a greater number and variety of lexical bundles than the one by the Yang couple. The study also identified the differences between the two versions which can be traced back to the deployment of different translation strategies of the translators, appearing in turn to be influenced by the language backgrounds of the translators, the translation skopos and settings, and the social, political, and ideological milieu in which the translations were produced. (shrink)

Cet article fournit, dans sa première section, une analyse méthodologique de l’utilisation de corpora, au cours de laquelle je détaille, de manière argumentée ce qu’on peut en attendre et pour quels objectifs, précise ce qu’on ne peut pas en attendre et montre pourquoi. La première partie conclut sur l’inutilité des corpora d’occurrences en sémantique des langues, même s’ils sont indispensables dans d’autres disciplines (comme, par exemple, les études littéraires) ; j’insiste sur le caractère nuisible de leur utilisation en sémantique, sauf (...) dans un cas que je spécifie, utilisation qui réintroduit l’introspection sémantique en la maquillant derrière un appareil technique inspiré des statistiques. Dans la deuxième section, je montre qu’il existe un moyen de sortir du carcan pseudo-méthodologique que la mode présentant les corpora comme unique accès à l’observation empirique tente d’imposer ; ce moyen, qui part de l’idée d’enrichir les corpora par des indications sur l’interprétabilité des échantillons, comporte deux aspects principaux : (i) réhabiliter l’expérimentation empirique et (ii) rechercher des hypothèses théoriques permettant d’engendrer des hypothèses descriptives à tester au moyen des expériences empiriques. On y insiste sur le fait que, conformément à ce que requiert une démarche scientifique rigoureuse, les tests empiriques ne peuvent pas vérifier une hypothèse, mais seulement la réfuter : c’est l’échec de la réfutation qui constitue un indice de validité (provisoire) de l’hypothèse. La troisième section présente, en détail et avec des illustrations, deux tests empiriques permettant des expérimentations destinées à tester les descriptions sémantiques que l’on peut être amené à proposer. On y insiste sur le fait que les corpora nécessaires à ces expérimentations peuvent être petits, mais nécessitent une interaction minimale entre l’observateur et les destinataires des échantillons : ils sont enrichis par une indication non verbale, fournie par les destinataires des échantillons, à propos de l’éventuelle difficulté qu’ils ont eues à les interpréter. Les tests sémantiques utilisant des unités de langue déjà décrites, le chapitre conclut sur l’avantage d’une incrémentation de la descriptibilité des unités de langue s’appuyant sur la récursivité des moyens de tester les descriptions : toute description non réfutée par les tests existants permet de construire de nouveaux tests. (shrink)

Human development takes place in a social context. Two pervasive sources of social information are faces and hands. Here, we provide the first report of the visual frequency of faces and hands in the everyday scenes available to infants. These scenes were collected by having infants wear head cameras during unconstrained everyday activities. Our corpus of 143 hours of infant-perspective scenes, collected from 34 infants aged 1 month to 2 years, was sampled for analysis at 1/5 Hz. The major finding (...) from this corpus is that the faces and hands of social partners are not equally available throughout the first two years of life. Instead, there is an earlier period of dense face input and a later period of dense hand input. At all ages, hands in these scenes were primarily in contact with objects and the spatio-temporal co-occurrence of hands and faces was greater than expected by chance. The orderliness of the shift from faces to hands suggests a principled transition in the contents of visual experiences and is discussed in terms of the role of developmental gates on the timing and statistics of visual experiences. (shrink)

Teaching is hypothesized to be a species-typical behavior in humans that contributed to the emergence of cumulative culture. Several within-culture studies indicate that foragers depend heavily on social learning to acquire practical skills and knowledge, but it is unknown whether teaching is universal across forager populations. Teaching can be defined ethologically as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost and the novice acquires skills/knowledge more efficiently or that (...) it would not acquire otherwise. One behavioral modification hypothesized to be an adaptation for teaching is ostensive communication—exaggerations of prosody and gesture that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge and indicate the intended receiver. On this view, the use of ostensive communication in conjunction with the transmission of generalizable knowledge constitutes evidence of teaching. Oral storytelling appears to meet these criteria: Indigenous peoples regard their traditions as important sources of ecological and social knowledge, and oral storytelling is widely reported to employ paralinguistic communication. To test this hypothesis, descriptions of performed narrative in forager societies were coded for the use of 14 ostensive-communicative behaviors and the presence of generalizable knowledge. Although biased toward North America, the study sample comprised 53 forager cultures spanning five continents, 34 language families, and diverse biomes. All cultures evinced the predicted behaviors. Results suggest that foragers use storytelling as a mode of instruction, thus providing cross-cultural evidence of teaching in forager populations. (shrink)

We investigated the emergence of sociolinguistic indexicality using an artificial-language-learning paradigm. Sociolinguistic indexicality involves the association of linguistic variants with nonlinguistic social or contextual features. Any linguistic variant can acquire “constellations” of such indexical meanings, though they also exhibit an ordering, with first-order indices associated with particular speaker groups and higher-order indices targeting stereotypical attributes of those speakers. Much natural-language research has been conducted on this phenomenon, but little experimental work has focused on how indexicality emerges. Here, we present three (...) miniature artificial-language experiments designed to break ground on this question. Results show ready formation of first-order indexicality based on co-occurrence alone, with higher-order indexicality emerging as a result of extension to new speaker groups, modulated by the perceived practical importance of the indexed social feature. (shrink)

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre‐registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11‐dimensional (...) representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co‐occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow‐up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/. (shrink)

Vector models of language are based on the contextual aspects of language, the distributions of words and how they co-occur in text. Truth conditional models focus on the logical aspects of language, compositional properties of words and how they compose to form sentences. In the truth conditional approach, the denotation of a sentence determines its truth conditions, which can be taken to be a truth value, a set of possible worlds, a context change potential, or similar. In the vector models, (...) the degree of co-occurrence of words in context determines how similar the meanings of words are. In this paper, we put these two models together and develop a vector semantics for language based on the simply typed lambda calculus models of natural language. We provide two types of vector semantics: a static one that uses techniques familiar from the truth conditional tradition and a dynamic one based on a form of dynamic interpretation inspired by Heim’s context change potentials. We show how the dynamic model can be applied to entailment between a corpus and a sentence and provide examples. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAfter co-occurrence of a neutral conditioned stimulus with an affective unconditioned stimulus, the evaluation of the CS acquires the US valence. This effect disappears when infor...

Empirical studies indicate that analogy consists of two main processes: retrieval and mapping. While current theories and models of analogy have revealed much about the mainly structural constraints that govern the mapping process, the similarities that underpin the correspondences between individual representational elements and drive retrieval are understood in less detail. In existing models symbol similarities are externally defined but neither empirically grounded nor theoretically justified. This paper introduces a new model (EMMA: the environmental model of analogy) which relies on (...) co‐occurrence information provided by LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis; Landauer & Dumais, 1997) to ground the relations between the symbolic elements aligned in analogy. LSA calculates a contextual distribution for each word encountered in a corpus by counting the frequency with which it co‐occurs with other words. This information is used to define a model that locates each word encountered in a high‐dimensional space, with relations between elements in this space representing contextual similarities between words. A series of simulation experiments demonstrate that the environmental approach to semantics embodied in LSA can produce appropriate patterns of analogical retrieval, but that this semantic measure is not sufficient to model analogical mapping. The implications of these findings, both for theories of representation in analogy research and more general theories of semantics in cognition, are explored. (shrink)

Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and (...) L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice—once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again two months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset+40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener, Lee, & Tao, 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech. (shrink)

As a discourse genre, statements of purpose are characterized by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Statements of purpose are required in applications for a place in a postgraduate course, and they are requested to obtain information about the academic and professional background and skills of each applicant. A study of the genre’s linguistic and textual features is needed in Spanish to discover and understand writers’ and readers’ perception of this genre. A corpus of 50 (...) motivation letters in Spanish is analyzed here. We study the distinguishing macro- and microtextual features of this particular genre and co-occurrences between both kinds of features. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose display prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be classified as writers’ moves and readers’ moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are discussed. This multiple perspectives analysis of the corpus shows evidence of significant co-occurrences among modalization, discourse markers, and rhetorical moves. Writers’ ideal representations of this discourse genre, which spans the academic and professional fields, can also be deduced. (shrink)

The VIA Classification on character strengths and virtues suggests 24 character strengths clustered into six core virtues. Three recent studies employed different methods for testing the assignment of character strengths to virtues, and generally supported the VIA classification. However, the co-occurrence of character strengths and virtues within individuals has not been examined yet. Another untested assumption is that an individual’s composition of character strengths is related to being considered of “good character.” Thus, the present study addresses three research questions: How (...) do character strengths and measured virtues co-occur within individuals? How does the number of character strengths an individual possesses within a virtue cluster relate to their level of the respective virtue? How does the composition of an individual’s character strengths relate to being considered of “good character”? We combined data from different studies to obtain a sample of N = 1,241 participants aged 18 to 92 years. All participants completed assessments of character strengths and virtues. Regarding, we found a high convergence of the correlations between strengths and virtues and the VIA Classification: 22 out of 24 character strengths correlated with the assigned virtue. Also, 15 character strengths showed the numerically highest correlation with their assigned virtue. Regarding, overall, we found a linear trend between the number of strengths within one cluster and the virtue level. Regarding, we found higher levels of reported “good character” in those who possessed either at least one character strength in each virtue cluster or all character strengths in at least one virtue compared to those who did not. The present results contribute to the discussion regarding the structure of character: individuals’ character strengths relate to differences in virtues, across different measures and data sources. Relationships were mostly as expected, and deviations were consistent with results obtained using other approaches. (shrink)

This study explores linguistic variation in outsourced call centers involving Filipino call-takers and American callers engaged in various types of customer service transactions. The specific goals of this study are: 1) to establish the statistical co-occurrence of linguistic features in outsourced call center discourse; and 2) to examine how the speakers use these features and patterns of speech based on role, gender, and the types of service transactions. The data for analysis come from a corpus of call center texts collected (...) in the Philippines. The research design follows a quantitative multi-dimensional framework developed by Biber for the extraction and interpretation of linguistic co-occurrence in the corpus. Three linguistic dimensions are extracted and interpreted microanalytically: 1) Addressee-Focused, Polite, and Elaborated Information vs Involved and Simplified Narrative; 2) Planned, Procedural Talk; and 3) Managed Information Flow. Results show that the discourse of agents and callers are different in linguistic and textual composition across these extracted dimensions. Similarly, accounts and participants' gender are both found to affect linguistic choices in the transactions. (shrink)

Ritual studies, a pivotal domain in the scholarly tradition of ancient China, occupy a crucial role in the exploration of humanistic and theological disciplines. Utilizing bibliometric analysis, corpus linguistics, and scientometric mapping, this paper examines a comprehensive dataset of 15,221 ritual studies articles spanning from 1916 to 2022, sourced from the CNKI database. The focus of these studies has traditionally been on ideological exploration, textual scrutiny, and archaeological verification, with a notable shift in the post-reform era from Confucian critiques to (...) authentication of ancient rituals, propelled by significant archaeological discoveries. Entering the 21st century, the field has broadened to intersect with intellectual history, philosophy, literature, and theological studies, reflecting an expanded methodological repertoire that includes ideological articulation, historical comparative analysis, and interdisciplinary exploration. This research introduces an innovative methodological approach by employing word embedding and semantic networks to delineate and trace underrepresented yet crucial research trajectories within the discipline. Through this semantic analysis, key scholars such as Kuang Heng, Cao Bao, Wang Chong, He Yang, Chen Li, and Chu Yinliang, along with cornerstone texts like the "Collected Commentaries on the Book of Rites" and "Illustrations of the Rites Classic," are identified as significant yet previously underexplored nodes within the academic discourse. This study not only sheds light on the evolution and current state of ritual studies in China but also highlights the profound philosophical and religious implications of these rituals in understanding the divine, the moral, and the human condition, thus contributing to a deeper comprehension of the spiritual and ethical dimensions that these practices embody. (shrink)

Event integration – the conflation of multiple events into a unitary event – plays a vital role in language and cognition. However, the conditions under which event integration occurs in linguistic representation and the differences in how linguistic forms encode complex events remain unclear. This corpus study examines two types of Japanese complex predicates – compound verbs [V1-V2]V and complex predicates consisting of a deverbal compound noun and the light verb suru ‘do’ [[V1-V2]N suru]V – using an original “related-event approach”. (...) Findings indicate that [[V1-V2]N suru]V can be established based on coextensiveness alone, whereas [V1-V2]V typically requires direct or shared causality (“the inevitable co-occurrence constraint”). The related-event approach examines related events of linguistic concepts, such as causes and purposes of an event, identified through “complex sentences” from ultra-large-scale web corpora. This study demonstrates that such an approach is effective in clarifying causal relationships between verbs. Furthermore, this paper contributes to the “iconicity versus frequency” debate by showing that conceptually more accessible events (causality plus coextensiveness) tend to be represented in a simpler form than less accessible events (coextensiveness only), due to “efficiency”. The frequency of usage is a result of the nature of concepts rather than the driving force of coding asymmetries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition. By EDWARD FARLEY. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1990. Pp. xxi + 295. The Evils of Theodicy. By TERRENCE W. TILLEY. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 277. The Co-Existence of God and Evil. By JANE MARY TRAU. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, 1991. Pp. 109. Evil is deeply and endlessly fascinating to the religious mind. On the (...) one hand, it challenges religion. The existence of the evils within our ken poses a threat to the rationality of central tenets of theism; the presence of overwhelming evils within our lives can threaten the viabil· ity of our religious attitudes and practices. On the other hand, religions typically offer strategies for coping with evil. They propose explanations of its origins that may aid us in understanding it, and they con· tain salvific practices that are meant to lead to redemption from sin or the cessation of suffering. So religious responses to evil are bound to be complex, and this complexity will inevitably be reflected in the treatment of evil in academic discourses. In addition, the present academic division of labor results in religion being studied in many disciplines. Each of them has its own traditions and agendas, and this often leads to a diversity of approaches that gives interdisciplinary dis· cussion of religious responses to evil something of the air of conversa· tion after Babel. The three books under review here, which represent the disciplines of philosophy, religious studies, and theology, illustrate nicely both the complexity and the diversity. Jane Mary Trau, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barry University, has written a short essay in analytic philosophy of religion proposing a solution to the logical problem of evil. The problem arises from the fact that there are arguments purporting to show that the proposition that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent is inconsistent with the proposition that evil exists. One way to solve the problem would be to find a possibly true proposition such that it is consistent with the proposition ·that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent and together with that proposition entails that evil exists. Alvin Plantinga's celebrated free-will defense offers a solution of this sort. Trau's alternative solution is a version of the familiar greater-goods defense. Trau's main claim is that it is possible that evil has positive value. An evil has positive value if it is logically necessary for some greater 525 526 BOOK REVIEWS good, and it certainly seems to he possible that some evils have positive value. Thus, for example, suppose God creates nothing other than two angels, A and B. Nothing interrupts the felicity of either hut a mild pang of sorrow felt by A, to which B responds with compassion. A's sorrow is logically necessary for the greater good of B's compassionate response to A's sorrow. Hence A's sorrow is an evil that has positive value. Moreover, the proposition that evils with positive value exist is consistent with the proposition that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnihenevolent. So the existence of evil is consistent with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnihenevolent deity. In other words, Trau's version of the greater-goods defense does seem to provide a solution to the logical problem of evil. But that is not to say that all the evils there actually are or even all those we know about do or could have positive value. Thus it does not follow, without further assumptions, that the existence of all the evils there actually are is consistent with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnihenevolent deity. In a discussion of natural evil near the end of her hook, Trau acknowledges the need for such additional assumptions. She says: "Four assumptions underlie the claim that natural evils have positive value: (1) The material universe has positive value. (2) The material universe must function in a way that requires the occurrence of natural evils as secondary effects. (3) The material universe is either the best or the only possible universe. (4) If the universe as we know it did not function the way it does... (shrink)

La représentation des relations de cooccurrence à l’échelle d’un corpus entier sous la forme d’un graphe permet d’étudier l’organisation des mots dans le discours par des moyens lexicométriques. Cette étude révèle deux formes d’organisation complémentaires de ce lexique. En premier lieu, une organisation hiérarchique, qui donne à certains lemmes une saillance particulière du fait de leur meilleur positionnement dans le réseau de relations de cooccurrence. En second lieu, une organisation modulaire, qui montre que les liens de cooccurrence dans le texte (...) répartissent le lexique en classes de lemmes co-occurrents les uns aux autres. Ces deux formes d’organisation du lexique dans les textes donnent une image du sens général de celui-ci, et permettent d’identifier la variabilité du sens lexical des unités telles qu’elles sont employées en discours. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of the “De Anima.” by H.J. BlumenthalLloyd P. GersonH.J. Blumenthal. Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of the “De Anima.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 244. Cloth, $57.50.The label ‘Neoplatonism’, coined in the eighteenth century to indicate a putative and rather ill-defined development within the Platonic tradition, is to this day applied in sundry ways. Presumably, ‘Neoplatonic’ (...) is supposed to be distinguished from ‘Platonic’, but the problem with this is that most of those ancient philosophers called ‘Neoplatonic’ thought of themselves simply as Platonists, that is, as authentic interpreters and continuators of Plato. Nevertheless, there are several important and relatively clear differentiations to be made among those within this tradition. One such refers to those Platonists who attempted to appropriate Aristotle’s philosophy. This was done principally in two ways. For Plotinus, Aristotelian concepts and distinctions were employed to defend Plato against Peripatetic attacks. For Porphyry and the later Platonic commentators on the works of the Aristotelian corpus, Aristotle was co-opted as an authority on the philosophy of the sensible world, leaving the higher, intelligible world to Plato. The commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima are particularly revealing in this regard. For one would assume that in matters regarding the soul it would be extremely difficult to see Aristotle and Plato as anything other than irreconcilable. Aristotle’s hylomorphism and explicit denial of the immortality of the soul hardly seem to be compatible with that which can be called, even on the most charitable interpretation, genuinely Platonic. In fact, the reconciliation of Aristotelian and Platonic soul doctrines is one of the central tasks late Platonists set for themselves. As Blumenthal notes: “Whatever the historical truth about the relation of Aristotle’s thought to Plato’s may have been, the Neoplatonist regarded it as propaedeutic to Plato’s as well as aiming at the same goal” (25).H. J. Blumenthal’s long-anticipated monograph explores in minute detail the extant commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima written by late Platonic or, if one insists, Neoplatonic philosophers. This book builds upon a large body of frequently groundbreaking work by the author on various facets of late Greek philosophy. The main commentaries studied are those of John Philoponus and the unknown authors dubbed ‘Pseudo-Philoponus’ and Pseudo-Simplicius’, though there is also considerable attention paid to Themistius, the last Peripatetic commentator on De Anima and, of course, [End Page 315] Alexander of Aphrodisias, whose commentary on De Anima has not survived but whose own immensely influential Peripatetic treatise on the soul does.This book is divided into two parts: I. Commentaries and Commentators and II. Interpretations of the De Anima. The first part provides the essential background to the second. Anyone approaching the Aristotelian commentators for the first time will find here a most useful guide. Even those who have some familiarity with this material will benefit from the author’s extensive knowledge of detail and judicious examination of some of the difficult issues of dating, authorship, philosophical lineage, and so on.The second section of the book concentrates on the De Anima commentaries. Here the author, following the order of the text of De Anima, systematically surveys the positions of the commentators on some of the central issues taken up in Aristotle’s work. These include the commentators’ efforts to reconcile Aristotle’s definition of the soul with Platonic assumptions about its nature and Plato’s tripartite division of the soul with Aristotle’s not entirely clear divisions. One of the instructive features of this comparative study of the commentaries is to see frequently how the issues that seize the imagination of modern commentators trouble the ancients not at all and vice versa.Most readers will be mainly interested in the chapters on the commentaries on the latter part of Book Two and Book Three of De Anima. From Plotinus onward, some of the most original philosophizing in the Platonic tradition focuses on self-consciousness, memory, imagination, and the integrative operation of the rational and arational powers. The last two chapters are filled with material about these issues as well as the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales by Jackie Elliott, and: The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition by Jay Fisher, and: Shaggy Crowns: Ennius’ Annales and Virgil’s Aeneid by Nora GoldschmidtThomas BiggsJackie Elliott. Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xiv + 590. Hardcover, $110.00.Jay Fisher. The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition. Baltimore: Johns (...) Hopkins University Press, 2014. x + 206. Hardcover, $69.95.Nora Goldschmidt. Shaggy Crowns: Ennius’ Annales and Virgil’s Aeneid. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. x + 258. Hardcover, $125.00.According to Aulus Gellius, Ennius claimed to have three hearts, each representing a part of his hybrid cultural identity (Gel. 17.71.1: Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret). Matching his hearts in number, the three books under review delve into the various Greek, Italic, and Latin influences on Ennius’ eighteen-book Annales, exploring the epic’s literary heritage and reception. One might rightly claim that in the wake of these important contributions (1088 pages for 623 fragments), we have firmly entered an aetas Enniana. The elephant in the room for all those interested in the poem is, of course, its highly fragmentary state of preservation. Instead of serving as an insurmountable obstacle, the scholarly process of interpreting fragmentary texts actually emerges as a shared feature of the methodologies on display in these otherwise quite different works. While Fisher and Goldschmidt push the limits of what an incomplete epic can communicate, Elliott more skeptically tackles the nature of transmission and its impact on our knowledge of the text.Ennius’ Oscan heart, representing his Italic heritage, takes center stage in Fisher’s study. Many readers will find most original and striking his arguments for the epic resonance and formulaic quality of “traditional” Latin phrases and their links with languages such as Umbrian and Oscan. Fisher relies throughout on the meaningful co-occurrence of communicative words, “traditional collocation” (3), and the use of language from various “traditional” cultural fields such as ritual, prayer, kinship, and the military (he adopts Lowell Edmunds’ concept of “system reference,” 5). According to Fisher, Ennius’ use of these culturally marked forms of language, shaped during the period of the central Italian koine\ (seventh to fourth centuries b.c.e.), allows his epic to include and enact an elevated tone appropriate to the inherited demands of his genre. While Ennius’ revolutionary turn to the hexameter may initially suggest a decision to abandon all that is old (or perhaps old-fashioned) about “native” literary culture, the pervasive presence of the Italic militates against severing Ennius from the lifeblood pumped through his Oscan heart. In fact, the dialogue between “foreign and familiar” aspects of culture is key to Fisher’s demonstration of how the Italic past emerges as a ghostly mediator and occasional replacement of superficially Greek and Homeric elements (10, 56, 85).With a presumed audience of Latinists, it is somewhat surprising that the introduction, “Ennius and the Italic Tradition,” devotes little time to outlining his rather unique methodology. But Fisher prefers to show rather than tell. On page 5 he jumps right into an analysis of Skutsch Ann. 232 (non semper vostra [End Page 713] evortit nunc Iuppiter hac stat), the language and context of Jupiter Stator in Cicero Cat. 1, and the Oscan Jupiter Versor: he convincingly connects Oscan Iovi Versori with Ennius’ evortit... Iuppiter (8). While the particulars of the argument take a winding course through various temples and texts, it is the act itself of probing seemingly commonplace language to reveal linguistic and cultural significance that highlights the best of what Fisher has to offer.Chapter 2, “The Annals and the Greek Tradition,” traces the Italic features of the epic through what one might call cross-lingual window-allusion. For example, Ann. 1 (Musae quae pedibus magnum pulsatis Olympum) contains a well-known substitution of the Greek Musae for his predecessors’ Camenae, but Fisher draws our attention to the “native Latin tradition” of the Salian priests’ tripudium behind pedibus... pulsatis: “if the collocation pedem pulsare is a traditional expression for... (shrink)

Boris Vian crée son hétéronyme Vernon Sullivan en 1946. Or, leurs romans s’inscrivent dans des sous-genres discursifs bien distincts. Dès lors, peut-on parler de deux romanciers pour une même plume? Quel rôle joue le genre et son impact endigue-t-il tout point de rencontre? Au contraire, existe-t-il, malgré tout, des liens intertextuels entre les deux œuvres? Ces questions résultent d’une rencontre entre trois recherches doctorales qui a permis de croiser un concept (l’hétéronymie) à une méthode (la logométrie). Pour répondre à ces (...) questions linguistiques, cet article déroule en effet le protocole méthodologique de la logométrie et propose des premiers éléments de réponse. Pour réaliser cette étude, notre corpus contraste les romans de douze auteurs contemporains et proches génériquement des romans de Boris Vian et de Vernon Sullivan. Ce corpus est disponible sur le logiciel Hyperbase (développé au laboratoire Bases, Corpus, Langage UMR 7320). Le parcours interprétatif de cet article est le suivant : nous partons de résultats issus de la statistique occurrentielle (1) et cooccurrentielle (2) pour aller progressivement vers des zones de textualité réunissant Boris Vian à Vernon Sullivan (3). (shrink)

Le présent exposé tente d’explorer et de comparer les méthodes qu’on a proposées jusqu’ici pour mesurer la distance entre deux textes. Les formules sont diverses, et s’appliquent tantôt à la fréquence, tantôt à la présence / absence. Et l’objet mesuré varie grandement (graphies, n‑grammes, lemmes, classes de fréquence, codes grammaticaux, structures syntaxiques ou sémantiques). L’expérience montre pourtant que la convergence est au rendez-vous.

English modal enclitics are typically conceived of as colloquial pronunciation variants that are semantically identical to their respective full forms. Although this conception has already been challenged by Nesselhauf, Nadja. 2014. From contraction to construction? The recent life of ’ll. In Marianne Hundt, Late modern English syntax, 77–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Daugs, Robert. 2021. Contractions, constructions and constructional change: Investigating the constructionhood of English modal contractions from a diachronic perspective. In Martin Hilpert, Bert Cappelle & Ilse Depraetere, Modality (...) and diachronic construction grammar, 12–52. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, who argue for the constructional status of both enclitics, the present study proposes a refinement according to which the differences between enclitics and full forms can be pinpointed to specific co-occurrence patterns. Rather than rashly postulating a general ’d-construction or an ’ll-construction, the data indicate that lower-level instances, like I’d V, we’ll V, or it would V, are very much capable of capturing the meaning differences between enclitics and full forms without recourse to higher, more abstract level. This is achieved by assessing the changes in the associative links these patterns entertain in a data-driven, bottom-up fashion. By utilizing the COHA and a variety of quantitative methods, it can be shown that, although enclitic patterns become more frequent and more varied, they remain overall still more restricted than the full forms, which promotes the emergence of ‘new’ symbolic associations. The results are integrated into current research in Diachronic Construction Grammar and dynamic, network-oriented models of language. (shrink)

This book studies Chinese opposites. It uses a large corpus to trace the behavior of opposite pairings’ co-occurrence, focusing on the following questions: In what types of constructions, from window-size restricted and bi-syllabic to quad-syllabic, will the opposite pairings appear together? And, on a larger scale, i.e. in constrained-free contexts, in which syntactic frames will the opposite pairings appear together? The data suggests aspects that have been ignored by previous theoretical studies, such as the ordering rules in co-occurrent pairings, the (...) differences between the three main sub-types of opposites in discourse function distributions. The author also considers the features of this Chinese study and compares it to similar studies of English and Japanese. In all, it offers a practical view of how opposites are used in a certain language as a response to the puzzles lingering in theoretical fields. This study appeals to linguists, computational linguists and language-lovers. With numerous tables, illustrations and examples, it is easy to read but also encourages readers to link their personal instincts with the results from a large corpus to experience the beauty of language as a shared human resource. (shrink)

Background: The comorbidity of posttraumatic stress disorder and depression is common among people living with the HIV. Given the high prevalence and serious clinical consequences of the comorbidity of these two disorders, we conducted a latent profile analysis to examine the co-occurrence pattern of PTSD and depression in PLWH.Methods: The data for this cross-sectional study of PLWH were collected from 602 patients with HIV in China. A secondary analysis using latent profile analysis was conducted to examine HIV-related PTSD and depression (...) symptoms.Results: A four-class solution fits the data best, with the four classes characterized as asymptomatic, mild symptoms, low to moderate symptoms, and high to moderate symptoms. The severity of PTSD and depression symptoms was comparable in this solution, and no group was dominated by PTSD or depression.Conclusion: The absence of a distinct subcluster of PLWH with only PTSD or depression symptoms supports that PTSD and depression in PLWH are psychopathological manifestations after traumatic exposures. Health care staff should pay more attention to the existence of comorbid symptoms of individuals, develop integrated interventions for the symptoms cluster, and evaluate their effectiveness in clinical practice. (shrink)

Research on COVID-19 has drawn the attention of scholars around the world since the outbreak of the pandemic. Several literature reviews of research topics and themes based on scientometric indicators or bibliometric analyses have already been conducted. However, topics and themes in linguistic-specific research on COVID-19 remain under-studied. With the help of the CiteSpace software, the present study reviewed linguistic research published in SSCI and A&HCI journals to address the identified gap in the literature. The overall performance of the documents (...) was described and document co-citations, keyword co-occurrence, and keyword clusters were visualized via CiteSpace. The main topic areas identified in the reviewed studies ranged from the influences of COVID-19 on language education, and speech-language pathology to crisis communication. The results of the study indicate not only that COVID-19-related linguistic research is topically limited but also that insufficient attention has been accorded by linguistic researchers to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, and Corpus-based discourse analysis in exploring pandemic discourses and texts. (shrink)

The embodiment approach has shown that motor neural networks are involved in the processing of action verbs. There is developmental evidence that embodied effects on verb processing are already present in early years. Yet, the ontogenetic origin of this motor reuse in action verbs remains unknown. This longitudinal study investigates the co-occurrence of manual verbs and actions during mother-child daily routines when children were 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 years old. Eight mother-child dyads were video-recorded in 3-month intervals (...) across 12 months, and the timing of verbs and manual actions were coded by independent observers. Results showed that the probability of matched verb-action co-occurrences were much higher than that of random co-occurrences for Group 1 and Group 2, respectively. The distributions of the verb-action temporal intervals in both groups were quite symmetrical and skewed with the peak corresponding to both 0.00 s synchronic intervals and the shortest +5 s interval. Mother-led instances occurred in both groups whereas child-led instances were restricted to Group 2. Mothers pragmatically aligned their verbal productions, since they repeatedly used those verbs they shared with their children’s repertoire. In conclusion, the early multisensory communicative and manipulative scene affords grounding of verb meanings on the ongoing actions, facilitating verb-action pairing in the realm of social interactions, providing a new dimension to the prevailing solipsistic approach to embodiment. (shrink)

The present study investigates the collocation-induced semiosis of the linguistic sign AFRICA as being used in the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (known as COCA) (Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): one billion words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). Drawing on a hybrid theoretical framework, the study utilizes Charles Peirce’s (1931–58) semiotic model of the sign and Roman Jakobson’s theory of “markedness” (Jakobson, Roman. 1972. Verbal communication. Scientific American (Special Issue, September 1). (...) 73–80) as well as Stuart Hall’s treatment of “code” (Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, & Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, 117–127. New York: Routledge) and John Swales’ notion of “discourse community” (Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The study empirically tests the hypothesis that, in a given discourse domain, the relevant interpretant can decode a linguistic sign (representamen) in the co-text of its marked collocates in a way that is collocationally used via the two modes of iconic and indexical signification. The concordance-based analysis conducted in the present study offers two findings, theoretical and practical. First, the study proposes the theoretical concept of collocational semiosis as one way of methodologically integrating the study of collocation into a structural-linguistic analytic framework that richly intersects with the genre-based notion of “discourse community.” Second, in the academic discourse community of the COCA, to the expert interpretant, the representamen AFRICA has been decoded due to its marked collocates which have been technically used in two modes of signification, viz. iconic and indexical. (shrink)

This study investigates interpretations of the Japanese initial mora-based minimizer “X.Y...”-_no_ “X”-_no ji-mo_ ‘lit. even the letter “X” of “X.Y...”.’ Although initial mora-based minimizers have a literal interpretation of _ji_ ‘letter’, they have a non-literal interpretation as well. The non-literal interpretation has several distinctive features that are not present in ordinary minimizers. First, it is highly productive in that various expressions can appear in the form “X.Y...”-_no_ “X”-_no ji_. Second, non-literal minimizers typically co-occur with predicates that relate to knowledge, information, (...) concepts, thought, and habituality, as seen in the corpus data (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese [BCCWJ]). I argue that in the non-literal use, X refers to the minimum on the scale of the main predicate concerning “X.Y...”. I suggest that the non-literal use was developed as a result of the conventionalization of the pragmatic inference derived from the literal reading, and that the co-occurrence with predicates related to knowledge, information, knowledge, concepts, thought, or habituality is due to the interpretation of “X.Y...”, which were originally interpreted as letters as an abstract concept. The theoretical implication of this study is that, in addition to a non-compositional (lexically specified) minimizer whose scale is lexically fixed (e.g., _give a damn_, _lift a finger_), there also exists a compositional (lexically unspecified) minimizer in natural language, whose scale is specified via the predicate with which the minimizer co-occurs. The last section of this paper briefly discusses similar/related phenomena in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Korean, and English from a cross-linguistic perspective. (shrink)

There is growing evidence that some individuals engage in both self-harm and aggression during the course of their lifetime. The co-occurrence of self-harm and aggression is termed dual-harm. Individuals who engage in dual-harm may represent a high-risk group with unique characteristics and pattern of harmful behaviours. Nevertheless, there is an absence of clinical guidelines for the treatment and prevention of dual-harm and a lack of agreed theoretical framework that accounts for why people may engage in this behaviour. The present work (...) aimed to address this gap in the literature by providing a narrative review of previous research of self-harm, aggression and dual-harm, and through doing so, presenting an evidence-based theory of dual-harm – the cognitive-emotional model of dual-harm. This model draws from previous studies and theories, including the General Aggression Model, diathesis-stress models and emotional dysregulation theories. The cognitive-emotional model highlights the potential distal, proximal and feedback processes of dual-harm, the role of personality style and the possible emotional regulation and interpersonal functions of this behaviour. In line with our theory, various clinical and research implications for dual-harm are suggested, including hypotheses to be tested by future studies. (shrink)

The organization of our knowledge about the world into an interconnected network of concepts linked by relations profoundly impacts many facets of cognition, including attention, memory retrieval, reasoning, and learning. It is therefore crucial to understand how organized semantic representations are acquired. The present experiment investigated the contributions of readily observable environmental statistical regularities to semantic organization in childhood. Specifically, we investigated whether co‐occurrence regularities with which entities or their labels more reliably occur together than with others (a) contribute to (...) relations between concepts independently and (b) contribute to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. Using child‐directed speech corpora to estimate reliable co‐occurrences between labels for familiar items, we constructed triads consisting of a target, a related distractor, and an unrelated distractor in which targets and related distractors consistently co‐occurred (e.g., sock‐foot), belonged to the same taxonomic category (e.g., sock‐coat), or both (e.g., sock‐shoe). We used an implicit, eye‐gaze measure of relations between concepts based on the degree to which children (N = 72, age 4–7 years) looked at related versus unrelated distractors when asked to look for a target. The results indicated that co‐occurrence both independently contributes to relations between concepts and contributes to relations between concepts belonging to the same taxonomic category. These findings suggest that sensitivity to the regularity with which different entities co‐occur in children's environments shapes the organization of semantic knowledge during development. Implications for theoretical accounts and empirical investigations of semantic organization are discussed. (shrink)

Combining the frameworks of multi-dimensional analysis and rhetorical structure theory, this study examines the linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of corporate annual reports and interprets their underlying functional dimensions. Our corpus consists of texts of corporate 10K reports from firms listed on New York Stock Exchange. Five functional dimensions are quantitatively extracted and qualitatively interpreted: expression of direct persuasion; expression of impersonal stance; subjective versus objective positioning; integrative expression of stance versus fragmented expression; and expression of reliability. All these (...) dimensions contribute to the communicative function of persuasion. The analysis of the rhetorical structures of excerpts with high concentrations of co-occurring linguistic features on each dimension further indicates the communicative strategy of persuasion. The proposed MD model is then applied to analyze the effect of firm performance on the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. We found that firm performance can significantly affect the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. CAR discourse from firms with good performance is more reliable. The result reveals managements’ use of concealment strategy in impression management. This study has implications for MD analysis, business discourse analysis, language pedagogy and accounting research. (shrink)