Since the thirteenth century at the latest, the role of money had become increasingly important in the wake of growing national and international trade, which also found vivid expression in many literary texts. These texts often serve well as mirrors of social and economic transformations, such as the Schwank (jest narrative), in which the various poets made fun of many different people and laughed about ordinary situations both in the village and in the city, in a monastery or in a castle. Hence, the explicit thematization of money in these Schwänke (plural) does not really surprise us, but scholars have not paid enough attention to this phenomenon. Turning to the voluminous Wendunmuth by Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof (1563), we have an excellent opportunity to identify the ubiquitous presence of money in all human relations and the trouble which it has always created. In his short prose texts, we encounter some of the most explicit comments about the huge impact of money on early modern German society.
German literature, Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages
It is well-known that abstract interpreters can be systematically derived from their concrete counterparts using a "recipe," but developing sound static analyzers remains a time-consuming task. Reducing the effort required and mechanizing the process of developing analyzers continues to be a significant challenge. Is it possible to automatically retarget an existing abstract interpreter for a new language? We propose a novel technique to automatically derive abstract interpreters for various languages from an existing abstract interpreter. By leveraging partial evaluation, we specialize an abstract interpreter for a source language. The specialization is performed using the semantics of target languages written in the source language. Our approach eliminates the need to develop analyzers for new targets from scratch. We show that our method can effectively retarget an abstract interpreter for one language into a correct analyzer for another language.
Gabriel Orlanski, Kefan Xiao, Xavier Garcia
et al.
Current benchmarks for evaluating neural code models focus on only a small subset of programming languages, excluding many popular languages such as Go or Rust. To ameliorate this issue, we present the BabelCode framework for execution-based evaluation of any benchmark in any language. BabelCode enables new investigations into the qualitative performance of models' memory, runtime, and individual test case results. Additionally, we present a new code translation dataset called Translating Python Programming Puzzles (TP3) from the Python Programming Puzzles (Schuster et al. 2021) benchmark that involves translating expert-level python functions to any language. With both BabelCode and the TP3 benchmark, we investigate if balancing the distributions of 14 languages in a training dataset improves a large language model's performance on low-resource languages. Training a model on a balanced corpus results in, on average, 12.34% higher $pass@k$ across all tasks and languages compared to the baseline. We find that this strategy achieves 66.48% better $pass@k$ on low-resource languages at the cost of only a 12.94% decrease to high-resource languages. In our three translation tasks, this strategy yields, on average, 30.77% better low-resource $pass@k$ while having 19.58% worse high-resource $pass@k$.
There is a one-to-one and onto correspondence between the class of numerical semigroups of depth $n$, where $n$ is an integer, and a certain language over the alphabet $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ which we call a Kunz language of depth $n$. The Kunz language associated with the numerical semigroups of depth $2$ is the regular language $\{1,2\}^*2\{1,2\}^*$. We prove that Kunz languages associated with numerical semigroups of larger depth are context-sensitive but not regular.
This study presents German FinBERT, a novel pre-trained German language model tailored for financial textual data. The model is trained through a comprehensive pre-training process, leveraging a substantial corpus comprising financial reports, ad-hoc announcements and news related to German companies. The corpus size is comparable to the data sets commonly used for training standard BERT models. I evaluate the performance of German FinBERT on downstream tasks, specifically sentiment prediction, topic recognition and question answering against generic German language models. My results demonstrate improved performance on finance-specific data, indicating the efficacy of German FinBERT in capturing domain-specific nuances. The presented findings suggest that German FinBERT holds promise as a valuable tool for financial text analysis, potentially benefiting various applications in the financial domain.
It has been noted that examples with extractions out of relative clauses that have been attested in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are judged to be unacceptable in Icelandic and Faroese. We hypothesize that this may reflect whether or not speakers tend to prepose unstressed object pronouns as a way of establishing a coherent discourse. In this article we investigate to what extent pronoun preposing is used in Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese and whether there is any correlation with the acceptabilty of extractions from relative clauses. We show that Icelandic speakers use pronoun preposing to a very limited extent whereas Faroese speakers often prepose the VP or sentential anaphor tað. In both languages extraction from relative clauses is mainly judged to be unacceptable, with Faroese speakers being somewhat more accepting of extraction from presentational relatives. A crucial factor seems to be whether preposing is associated with a marked, contrastive interpretation or not.
Change in language use is driven by cultural forces; it is unclear whether that extends to programming languages. They are designed to be used by humans, but interaction with computer hardware rather than a human audience may limit opportunities for evolution of the lexicon of used terms. I tested this in R, an open source, mature and commonly used programming language for statistical computing. In corpus of 360,321 GitHub repositories published between 2014 and 2021, I extracted 168,857,044 function calls to act as n-grams of the R language. Over the eight-year period, R rapidly diversified and underwent substantial lexical change, driven by increasing popularity of the tidyverse collection of community packages. My results provide evidence that users can influence the evolution of programming languages, with patterns that match those observed in natural languages and reflect genetic evolution. R's evolution may have been driven by increased analytic complexity, driving new users to R, creating both selective pressure for an alternate lexicon and accompanying advective change. The speed and magnitude of this change may have flow-on consequences for the readability and continuity of analytic and scientific inquiries codified in R and similar languages.
Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit Moritz von Uslars Reportageromanen Deutschboden (2010) und Nochmal Deutschboden (2020) sowie André Schäfers Film zum ersten Band (2013). Anhand dieser Werke lassen sich Kompetenzen im Umgang mit Wirklichkeitskonstruktionen besonders gut fördern: Zum einen kreuzen sowohl die Texte als auch der Film unentwegt die Grenze zwischen faktualem und fiktionalem Erzählen, zum anderen geht es darin um ein Thema, in dem die mediale Konstruiertheit bzw. die Perspektivgebundenheit der wahrgenommenen Wirklichkeit besonders relevant ist: die Ursachen des Rechtsradikalismus in den neuen Bundesländern. Im Aufsatz wird untersucht, in welchem Verhältnis Anschauen und Verstehen jeweils zueinander stehen und welche Möglichkeiten der didaktischen Vermittlung sich dadurch eröffnen.
Abstract (english): Down to earth. Reality construction in Moritz von Uslar‘s Deutschboden projects
The article focuses on Moritz von Uslar’s reportage novels Deutschboden (2010) and Nochmal Deutschboden (2020) as well as André Schäfer’s film adaption of the first volume (2013). These works seem to lend themselves to teaching analytical competence when dealing with constructions of reality: Both novels and the movie oscillate between factual and fictional narration. Also, they deal with the problem of right-wing radicalism in Germany’s newly-formed federal states, i.e. a topic for which the constructedness of perceived reality is highly relevant. The main focus is on the relation between gazing and understanding and on the resulting didactic potential.
Den store, norske språkhistorien er nå fullført, i den forstand at samtlige fire bind har forlatt trykkpressen, sett dagens lys, og forhåpentligvis nådd et bredt utvalg lesere. Etter at bind 1 har presentert språkstruktur, og bind 2 praksis, står ideologier for tur i bind 3 (heretter NSH III). Tove Bull med kollegaer har gjort et pionerarbeid, for dette er første gang det er gitt ut et eget bind om ideologier i språkhistorie. Formålet er tydelig uttalt: «Føremålet med ideologianalyse i norsk språkhistorisk samanheng er å avdekkje premissar, førestillingar og haldningar som har lege til grunn for dei språklege og språksosiale endringane som har prega språkutviklinga her til lands gjennom tida.» (NSH III: 25). Med bindene Mønster, Praksis og Ideologi på plass er vi et skritt nærmere innsikt i det Michael Silverstein (1945–2020) kalte «the total linguistic fact» (Silverstein 1985). For å forstå språklig mening fullt ut må vi nettopp inkludere aspekter som angår både språklig form, språkbruk og språkideologi, og vi må se dem sammen i et gitt domene. ...
Philology. Linguistics, Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages
The lexicons of natural languages are not isomorphic. Reasons for the anisomorphism can be sought on three interrelated planes: language structure, extralinguistic reality, and conceptualisation. Simply put, the relevant differences may reside in the language, the world, the mind, or any combination of these. As a result, what goes under the name of <i>lexicographic equivalence</i> is a rather heterogeneous category. Growing awareness of this fact has resulted over the years in the creation of several tentative typologies of equivalence, one of which is presented below, together with a brief discussion of some strategies for dealing with imperfect equivalence. The remaining part of the article comprises a detailed analysis of a single problem encountered while preparing a new edition of a bilingual dictionary for Polish learners of English. The task at hand involved choosing a viable counterpart for a (Polish) semantic neologism from among a few (English) equivalence candidates. In the discussion, reference is made both to the metalexicographic categories introduced earlier and to such concepts developed by lexical (especially cognitive) semantics which may prove helpful in capturing the meaning differences between the source-language item and its competing target-language renditions. This micro-scale dissection of a single specimen demonstrates that we are still some way from being able to classify, let alone deal with, all the instances of imperfect interlingual correspondence that come our way. Persisting in the efforts to advance our understanding of the complex issues covered by the blanket term lexicographic equivalence thus seems crucial for improving the treatment of meaning in bilingual dictionaries.
Philology. Linguistics, Languages and literature of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
We study the computational complexity of finite intersections and finite unions of deterministic context-free (dcf) languages. Earlier, Wotschke [J. Comput. System Sci. 16 (1978) 456--461] demonstrated that intersections of $(d+1)$ dcf languages are in general more powerful than intersections of $d$ dcf languages for any positive integer $d$ based on the separation result of the intersection hierarchy of Liu and Weiner [Math. Systems Theory 7 (1973) 185--192]. The argument of Liu and Weiner, however, works only on bounded languages of particular forms, and therefore Wotschke's result is not directly extendable to other non-bounded languages. To deal with a wide range of languages for the non-membership to the intersection hierarchy, we circumvent the specialization of their proof technics and devise a new and practical technical tool: two pumping lemmas for finite unions of dcf languages. Since the family of dcf languages is closed under complementation and also under intersection with regular languages, these pumping lemmas help us establish the non-membership relation of languages formed by finite intersections of target languages. We also concern ourselves with a relationship to deterministic limited automata of Hibbard [Inf. Control 11 (1967) 196--238] in this regard.
Giovanna D'Agostino, Davide Martincigh, Alberto Policriti
Ordering the collection of states of a given automaton starting from an order of the underlying alphabet is a natural move towards a computational treatment of the language accepted by the automaton. Along this path, Wheeler \emph{graphs} have been recently introduced as an extension/adaptation of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (the now famous BWT, originally defined on strings) to graphs. These graphs constitute an important data-structure for languages, since they allow a very efficient storage mechanism for the transition function of an automaton, while providing a fast support to all sorts of substring queries. This is possible as a consequence of a property -- the so-called \emph{path coherence} -- valid on Wheeler graphs and consisting in an ordering on nodes that "propagates" to (collections of) strings. By looking at a Wheeler graph as an automaton, the ordering on strings corresponds to the co-lexicographic order of the words entering each state. This leads naturally to consider the class of regular languages accepted by Wheeler automata, i.e. the Wheeler languages. It has been shown that, as opposed to the general case, the classic determinization by powerset construction is polynomial on Wheeler languages. As a consequence, most of the classical problems turn out to be "easy" -- that is, solvable in polynomial time -- on Wheeler languages. Moreover, deciding whether a DFA is Wheeler and deciding whether a DFA accepts a Wheeler language is polynomial. Our contribution here is to put an upper bound to easy problems. For instance, whenever we generalize by switching to general NFAs or by not fixing an order of the underlying alphabet, the above mentioned problems become "hard" -- that is NP-complete or even PSPACE-complete.
When a new programming language appears, the syntax and intended behaviour of its programs need to be specified. The behaviour of each language construct can be concisely specified by translating it to fundamental constructs (funcons), compositionally. In contrast to the informal explanations commonly found in reference manuals, such formal specifications of translations to funcons can be precise and complete. They are also easy to write and read, and to update when the language evolves. The PLanCompS project has developed a large collection of funcons. Each funcon is defined independently, using a modular variant of structural operational semantics. The definitions are available online, along with tools for generating funcon interpreters from them. This paper introduces and motivates funcons. It illustrates translation of language constructs to funcons, and funcon definition. It also relates funcons to the notation used in some previous language specification frameworks, including monadic semantics and action semantics.
A leaf path language is a Boolean combination of sets of the form $\mathsf{{}^mE}^k L$, with $k \ge 1$ and $L$ a regular word language, which consist of those forests where the node labels in at least $k$ leaf-to-root paths make up a word that belongs to $L$. We look at the class $\mathsf{*D}$ of the languages recognized by iterated wreath products of syntactic algebras of leaf path languages. We prove the existence of an algorithm that, given a regular forest language, returns in finite time a sequence of such algebras; their wreath product is divided by the language's syntactic algebra if, and only if this language belongs to $\mathsf{*D}$, which makes membership in this class a decidable question. The result also applies to the subclasses $\mathsf{PDL}$ and $\mathsf{CTL^*}$.
Abstract Verbs constitute one of the basic building blocks of a clause, setting the structure of arguments and expressing the relationships among nouns in various thematic roles. In general terms, verbs are lexical items expressing verb-oriented notions such as activities, processes, and states. In morphology-rich languages, the syntactic and lexical roles of verbs are mediated by typologically-oriented morphological means. The current Special Issue contrasts the structure and functions of verbs in languages from two morphologically rich, yet typologically different families. The articles in the Special Issue present spoken and written aspects of verbs in usage and development in German (a Germanic language) on the one hand, in Hebrew, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic (Semitic languages), on the other. From a theoretical linguistic perspective, we ask how the different typological features of these languages affect the function of verbs in sentences, and from a psycholinguistic perspective, we ask how typological differences affect the processing of verbs in the mature minds of adults and in the developing minds of children.
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay brought a sea change in semantic studies of colour terms when they published their book Basic Color Terms in 1969. Up to that point the dominant view was that each language represented a unique conceptual organisation of the world, a view supported by the fact that the colour spectrum is a continuum which provides not obvious breaks for the purposes of naming. Despite the many criticisms of their work which have followed, their methodology has proven extremely infl uential and been widely adopted. The project Evolution of Semantic Systems, 2011–2012, adopted their methodology for a study of colour terms in the Indo-European languages and the Colours in Context project applied the same methods to a study of Icelandic Sign Language. Signed languages diff er in many ways from spoken languages but the results of this study suggest the broad organisation of the colour space is the same in Icelandic Sign Language, Icelandic and British English. The colour space is organised by a few dominant terms, largely the same as Berlin and Kay ́s original basic colour terms. Yet within that broad patt ern is considerable microvariation, especially in the spaces between the dominant terms. There the characteristic patt erns of word formation in the language have a clear influence in colour naming strategies.
Dictionaries and other general reference works, North Germanic. Scandinavian
In this paper we propose a calculus for expressing algorithms for programming languages transformations. We present the type system and operational semantics of the calculus, and we prove that it is type sound. We have implemented our calculus, and we demonstrate its applicability with common examples in programming languages. As our calculus manipulates inference systems, our work can, in principle, be applied to logical systems.