Hasil untuk "Germanic languages. Scandinavian languages"

Weijun Chen, Yuxi Fu, Huan Long

Runtime efficiency and termination are crucial properties in the studies of program verification. Instead of dealing with these issues in an ad hoc manner, it would be useful to develop a robust framework in which such properties are guaranteed by design. This paper introduces a new imperative programming language whose design is grounded in a static type system that ensures the following equivalence property: All definable programs are guaranteed to run in polynomial time; Conversely, all problems solvable in polynomial time can be solved by some programs of the language. The contribution of this work is twofold. On the theoretical side, the foundational equivalence property is established, and the proof of the equivalence theorem is non-trivial. On the practical side, a programming approach is proposed that can streamline program analysis and verification for feasible computations. An interpreter for the language has been implemented, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach in practice.

Marco Carbone, Adele Veschetti

We present a choreographic framework for modelling and analysing concurrent probabilistic systems based on the PRISM model-checker. This is achieved through the development of a choreography language, which is a specification language that allows to describe the desired interactions within a concurrent system from a global viewpoint. Using choreographies gives a clear and complete view of system interactions, making it easier to understand the process flow and identify potential errors, which helps ensure correct execution and improves system reliability. We equip our language with a probabilistic semantics and then define a formal encoding into the PRISM language and discuss its correctness. Properties of programs written in our choreographic language can be model-checked by the PRISM model-checker via their translation into the PRISM language. Finally, we implement a compiler for our language and demonstrate its practical applicability via examples drawn from the use cases featured in the PRISM website.

Nathan Lhote, Aliaume Lopez, Lia Schütze

The set of finite words over a well-quasi-ordered set is itself well-quasi-ordered. This seminal result by Higman is a cornerstone of the theory of well-quasi-orderings and has found numerous applications in computer science. However, this result is based on a specific choice of ordering on words, the (scattered) subword ordering. In this paper, we describe to what extent other natural orderings (prefix, suffix, and infix) on words can be used to derive Higman-like theorems. More specifically, we are interested in characterizing languages of words that are well-quasi-ordered under these orderings. We show that a simple characterization is possible for the prefix and suffix orderings, and that under extra regularity assumptions, this also extends to the infix ordering. We furthermore provide decision procedures for a large class of languages, that contains regular and context-free languages.

Anna Hycnar

Massimo Bartoletti, Lorenzo Benetollo, Michele Bugliesi et al.

Smart contracts have played a pivotal role in the evolution of blockchains and Decentralized Applications (DApps). As DApps continue to gain widespread adoption, multiple smart contract languages have been and are being made available to developers, each with its distinctive features, strengths, and weaknesses. In this paper, we examine the smart contract languages used in major blockchain platforms, with the goal of providing a comprehensive assessment of their main properties. Our analysis targets the programming languages rather than the underlying architecture: as a result, while we do consider the interplay between language design and blockchain model, our main focus remains on language-specific features such as usability, programming style, safety and security. To conduct our assessment, we propose an original benchmark which encompasses a wide, yet manageable, spectrum of key use cases that cut across all the smart contract languages under examination.

Mark Marron

Integration, composition, mechanization, and AI assisted development are the driving themes in the future of software development. At their core these concepts are rooted in the increasingly important role of computing in our world, the desire to deliver functionality faster, with higher quality, and to empower more people to benefit from programmatic automation. These themes, and how they impact the human developers driving them, are the foundations for the next generation of programming languages. At first glance the needs of mechanization tools, AI agents, and human developers along with the various goals around development velocity, software quality, and software democratization are a broad and seemingly diverse set of needs. However, at their core is a single challenge that, once resolved, enables us to make radical progress in all of these areas. Our hypothesis is that, fundamentally, software development is a problem of reasoning about code and semantics. This is true for human developers implementing a feature, symbolic tools building models of application behavior, and even for language based AI agents as they perform tasks. While the particular aspects of reasoning that each agent struggles with varies to some degree, they share many common themes and, surprisingly, most mainstream languages extensively employ (anti)features that make this task harder or infeasible! This paper proposes a novel approach to this challenge -- instead of new language features or logical constructs, that add more complexity to what is already a problem of complexity, we propose radical simplification in the form of the Bosque platform and language.

Liliana Cojocaru

We deal with a normal form for context-free grammars, called Dyck normal form. This normal form is a syntactical restriction of the Chomsky normal form, in which the two nonterminals occurring on the right-hand side of a rule are paired nonterminals. This pairwise property, along with several other terminal rewriting conditions, makes it possible to define a homomorphism from Dyck words to words generated by a grammar in Dyck normal form. We prove that for each context-free language L, there exist an integer K and a homomorphism phi such that L=phi(D'_K), where D'_K is a subset of D_K and D_K is the one-sided Dyck language over K letters. As an application we give an alternative proof of the inclusion of the class of even linear languages in AC1.

Josue N. Rivera, Haiping Xu

Pumping lemma has been a very difficult topic for students to understand in a theoretical computer science course due to a lack of tool support. In this paper, we present an active learning tool called MInimum PUmping length (MIPU) educational software to explore the pumping lemma property for regular languages. For a given regular language, MIPU offers three major functionalities: determining the membership of an input string, generating a list of short strings that belong to the language, and automatically calculating the minimal pumping length of the language. The software tool has been developed to provide educational assistance to students to better understand the concepts of pumping lemma and minimum pumping length, and promote active learning through hand-on practice.

Valeria Chernyavskaya, Sergei Nefedov

This study investigates the semantics and pragmatics of the German keyword “Kollektiv” based on its actual uses in public discourse and by political actors. “Kollektiv” is regarded as a concept of greatsocial significance, yet it is also a most controversial notion. It relates to the universal values and benefits of collectivism such as mutual assistance, solidarity, effective cooperation when coping with difficulties, mutual support and sympathy. However, otherfeatures of collectivism such as having to integrate oneself into the community, setting equal boundaries for individuals, and invading people’s privacy activate negative meanings. This governs the evaluation-based polysemy of the keyword. The explanatory approach in this paper was formulated against the background of deontic meaning as a basic concept in semantics to analyze social evaluation of salient lexis. On par with their descriptive meaning, keywords have a deontic meaning component that their denotational interpretability depends on.The study was carried out as corpus-driven discourse analytical research. Discourse analysis proceeded as noncritical linguistic discourse analysis. To provide a functional perspective on Kollektiv, the “Digital Dictionary of the German Language” / “Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache” was used with its two sections of dictionaries and text corpora. Two specialized corpora from the “Digital dictionary” were employed: the “Corona corpus” that contains electronic texts with over 50 mln tokens on the coronavirus pandemic, and the corpus “Political Speeches” containing records of proceedings of the government bodies of German speaking countries and regions as well as transcripts of oral speeches delivered by politicians. We show that the word “Kollektiv”is employed both as description and as evaluation setting up both positive and negative deontics. The deontic polysemy of “Kollektiv” is activated in contextual uses. The conducted study addresses the way in which linguistic forms get integrated in larger activities in the social world and how, through salient lexicalizations in discourse, they open up the perspective to social diversity and polyphony.

Ksenia Kuzminykh

At the centre of this article lies Dita Zipfel‘s psychological, character oriented novel for young adults Wie der Wahnsinn mir die Welt erklärte. It focuses on philosophicalbackgrounds, structural complexity, diegetic unreliability, aesthetic ambiguity, and multiple addressee orientation. Special attention is paid to intertextual allusions and philosophical pre-texts. Using theories from cognitive psychology, the article examines the special status of figures as mental models. Furthermore, it deals with the analysis of the complex topic of emotions of the main characters. Emotions are intersubjective, culturally, and linguistically coded text phenomena. The forms of manifestation and the genesis of emotions take the form of both thematization and presentation in narrative discourse. They can be implicit or explicit. Another concentration is on the mental events of the characters. Mental events are a special type of action, a change in the state of consciousness of narrated individuals. This study seeks to delineate criteria and conditions for mental events and emotions and develops techniques for depicting the consciousness and emotions of narrated figures. These cultural coded phenomena in the minds of narrated individuals are essential features of narrated works for adults. The article investigates how changes in consciousness are depicted in works for children and young adults. A final emphasis of the study is on the theories of the comic differentiation in Zipfel’s psychological novel for young adults and their artistic and cultural significance.

Iryna Zadorozhna, Ivanna Kolomyiska

The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of peculiarities of usage of phraseological units in German newspaper text depending on gender factor. Special attention has been paid to the analysis of quantitative characteristics. The influence of the gender factor on the processes of modification of phraseological units has been observed. With the help of linguistic statistic methods (criterion χ2 and Chuprov’s contingency coefficient K) statistically significant quantitative differences in the usage of phraseological units by both sexes have been determined. The results of investigation conducted on the material of the Internet versions of two most popular German newspapers Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung have revealed quantitative differences in the usage of phraseological units by the two sexes mainly in “one-gender” speech. In “two-gender” speech the tendency to relative equality of communicators of both sexes has been observed. Among the phraseological units used in newspaper articles there is a group of units which is characterised by extremely high frequency of usage (hyper frequent) and which comprises “absolutely masculine”, “absolutely feminine”, “relatively masculine”, “relatively feminine” and “gender indifferent” phraseological units. The processes of expansion and substitution have proved to be the most noticeable changes in the structure of both male and female phraseological usages. Significance of usage of elliptical phraseological constructions in “one-gender women” articles has also been statistically proved. Differences that exist in “one gender” newspaper article show that communication, namely its speech expression, depends upon the gender identity of both communicants.

Adam Oberlin

Baltics: only the one essay reviewed here, and even that essay is more about the Swedish literary and academic influence on Finnish and Sámi religious studies and less about the pre-Christian religions themselves. One could have wished for more space to Sámi and Finnish religious studies, especially since it was mentioned as a goal in the introduction and it is likely to have been an area that was less familiar to many students and scholars of pre-Christian religions of the North. This reader was also a little confused by how the terms Scandinavian and Nordic were being employed. It is admittedly an ongoing issue when discussing the topic in English. Is Scandinavia a cultural, linguistic, or geographic description? Are the Finns and Sámi to be included? How should one refer to the people living on the Scandinavian peninsula speaking a Germanic language as opposed to their Finno-Ugric neighbors? An example of an area that is curiously missing altogether is oral theory. There has been some work looking at issues of orality and performance in the Poetic Edda in the wake of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord’s work on the subject starting in the early twentieth century with a crescendo half a century later, but there is no mention of this area of study in the work. References to scholars like Paul Acker and Robert Kellogg, and even my own work are missing, as well as work in progress on orality in saga prose. It must be said that this volume is ambitious: pre-Christian religions of the North have made a considerable mark on research and culture, especially over the last two centuries. Therefore, some things were bound to be left out, and whereas the volume’s aim is to “track the reception history of ideas” (p. xxiii), it is possible this line of inquiry was considered outside the purview of the book. In the end, scholars, researchers, and students will find this book a very useful reference work for a survey of scholarship and reception in a wide variety of fields relevant to The Pre-Christian Religions of the North. Scott A. Mellor University of Wisconsin-Madison

L. Cornips, F. Gregersen

Grammatical gender is known to be prone to language variation and change. The papers in this special issue account for gender variation and change in modern Germanic languages, in particular Danish, German, Norwegian, and Southern Dutch. With the exception of Danish (common, neuter), all other languages can be characterized as having a three-way gender distinction (feminine, masculine, and neuter). The special issue covers most of what has been discussed in the literature on gender in Germanic (for a recent overview see Kürschner 2020). The most important issues are as follows: simplification, resemanticization, the relationship between gender and other nominal categories, and the pragmatics of gender. With respect to simplification, Lohndal & Westergaard discuss Norwegian dialects in which three-way gender systems develop into twoway gender systems. Kühl & Heegård Petersen demonstrate a tendency for the neuter gender in Danish to be supplanted by the common gender. In contrast to Lohndal & Westergaard and Kühl & Heegård Petersen, Auer & Siegel demonstrate that the three-way gender distinction in German among multiethnic speakers is stable. However, they show that those multiethnic speakers simplify DPs in two ways. First, they use bare nouns and hence omit the (required) article as an item that agrees in gender value with its noun. Second, they use a generalized suffix for prenominal adjectives (that is, schwa) that expresses neither gender nor case, as in standard German. RESEMANTICIZATION is the process by which highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun, regardless of the grammatical gender of the noun. In a multivariate analysis, De Vos et al. show that the most important factor of resemanticization of the pronominal system of Southern Dutch is speech register in informal settings. The tendency for grammatical gender to correspond to natural gender is

Kajsa Djärv

This paper investigates the (recent) case alternation in Swedish equative and predicational copular sentences (‘Cicero is Tully’, ‘Cicero is a nice guy’). A central contribution of the paper is showing that this alternation is an LF-phenomenon, contra Sigurðsson (in: Hartmann, Molnárfi (eds) Comparative studies in Germanic syntax: from Afrikaans to Zurich German. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2006) who conjectures that Swedish is changing in the direction of English and Danish, where all postcopular DPs receive Accusative case, regardless of interpretation. The Swedish alternation is shown to track the same semantic dimension that conditions the choice of predicate case in languages like Polish, Russian and Dutch, namely the distinction between stage and individual level predication. Interestingly, the Swedish alternation is also shown to share distributional properties with the predicate case alternations in these languages. To account for these observations, I propose that the morphological and semantic contrasts between the two alternants are mediated by a structural difference, such that Nominative case involves a biclausal structure, and Accusative a monoclausal structure. This paper further adds to the typological picture, showing that Swedish patterns like Polish, Russian and Dutch, but unlike English and Danish, not just in terms of equative and predicational sentences, but also in specificational copular sentences (‘The fastest runner here is Lisa’). I argue that a particular kind of predicate inversion analysis is required to account for the Swedish type of specification.

Elly Van Gelderen

Jaap Grave, Ekaterina Vekshina

This article is dedicated to the Russian translations of the Dutch novel Max Havelaar or the coffee auctions of the Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappy (1860) by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–1887), who published his work under the pseudonym Multatuli. Max Havelaar is one of the best known and most translated works of Dutch literature. There are six complete Russian translations published between 1916 and 1959, which have not yet been analyzed. The authors hypothesize that German is the intermediate language in the Dutch-Russian literary transfer as research has shown that German often served as an intermediate language for translations into Scandinavian and Slavic languages during this period. In the specific case of Max Havelaar, the German translation by Wilhelm Spohr, who moved in circles of anarchists, served as an intermediate text. The authors also investigated whether the Russian translators used the English translation of 1868, but this was not the case. In the first part of this article, the biographies of the Russian translators, authors of forewords and editors who worked on the Russian translations are examined. In the second part, excerpts from the novel are compared with the translations to analyze the relationship between the texts. The results of the research confirm that the first Russian translations were based on Karl Mischke’s German translation, which had appeared almost simultaneously with Spohr’s. Traces of this translation can also be found in later texts. To the authors’ knowledge, it has not been shown before that Mischke’s translation and not Spohr’s was used as an intermediate text.

Luis Krausz

Este artigo propõe-se a analisar a trajetória do escritor austríaco Fritz Kalmar e seu conto “Der Austrospinner” (“O austro-louco”), incluído na antologia Das Herz europaschwer, de 1997, à luz das identidades surgidas no contexto da emancipação e da assimilação judaicas na Áustria. Georg von Winternitz, protagonista desta narrativa, encarna, em seu exílio boliviano, os fundamentos de uma identidade austríaca cultivada na velha Monarquia Habsburga, legatária do Sacro Império Romano Germânico, e organiza sua existência no novo país de acordo com valores éticos e com princípios católicos, humanistas e universalistas, cultivados, sobretudo, por literatos austríacos do fim do século XIX e do início do século XX, que se dedicaram à construção da identidade imperial austríaca. Esse sistema de valores, particularmente caro aos judeus austríacos da época do Kaiser Franz Josef, revela uma surpreendente sobrevida nos Andes bolivianos depois de 1938. Ao adotar um menino indígena que está em vias de tornar-se um ladrão, esse personagem não só pretende educá-lo como, sobretudo, pretende fazer dele “um austríaco”, o que significa, para o personagem, nele instilar um sistema de valores vinculado à extinta Áustria imperial. A discussão sobre esse conceito, “o austríaco”, presente na literatura austríaca do século XIX e do início do século XX, é trazida à tona para tentar compreender o que se encontra por trás deste projeto. Para além dessa questão surge, ao longo da narrativa, uma alusão ao fato de que tanto o narrador quanto o protagonista da narrativa são descendentes de judeus que também “se tornaram” austríacos. “Tornar-se austríaco”, assim, e com isto o conceito de gelernter Österreicher, temas inextricavelmente ligados ao processo de emancipação e assimilação judaica na Áustria do século XIX, são questões que ressurgem, de forma distópica e anacrônica, na Bolívia dos anos 1950, na trajetória de Kalmar tanto quanto na de seu personagem.

Hartmann Stefan

Michael Coblenz, Ariel Davis, Megan Hofmann et al.

Recently, user-centered methods have been proposed to improve the design of programming languages. In order to explore what benefits these methods might have for novice programming language designers, we taught a collection of user-centered programming language design methods to a group of eight students. We observed that natural programming and usability studies helped the students refine their language designs and identify opportunities for improvement, even in the short duration of a course project.