El artículo examina la cuestión de la anámnesis en la filosofía platónica, considerada como la caracterización de todo aprender como “recordar” en el Menón, el Fedro y el Fedón. Para tratar esta problemática, se presentan las presuposiciones necesarias de cualquier lectura de la anámnesis, notablemente la naturaleza de las formas contempladas y cómo se relacionan con nuestra comprensión. Con este fin, se recurre a las interpretaciones de Eric D. Perl y Hans-Georg Gadamer para “situar” la anámnesis dentro de una tradición interpretativa hermenéutico-filosófica de Platón. Posteriormente, se interpreta la anámnesis como una descripción del aprendizaje, y el “medio” que vincula nuestra comprensión y el ser revelado inteligiblemente —punto no desarrollado
por Perl o Gadamer—. La anámnesis se revela como “recordar lo eterno y siempre presente”, pasando de lo conceptual y lingüísticamente indeterminado a lo determinado. Finalmente, se sugieren vínculos entre la interpretación propuesta, la filosofía de Platón, Aristóteles y Gadamer.
The present study portrays some of the key aspects of connected speech in English, as adopted by 42 native Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian-speaking undergraduate students of English in the English Department, University of Tuzla, in the academic year 2013/2014. More specifically, the study shows how successfully these students developed their transcription skills in English, particularly when it comes to the use of diacritics for dental, velarised, and syllabic consonants of English, as well as for aspirated and unreleased (unexploded) English plosives. In addition, the study focuses on the coalescent type of assimilation. Connected speech (also known as rapid, relaxed, casual, or fluent speech) is characterised by a number of phonetic phenomena. The paper also analyses the level to which students enrolled in the English Department in Tuzla have developed a sense of elementary terms in this field, an understanding of the English sound system, and generally speaking, to what extent they developed their broad and narrow transcription skills.
Studies on most domains of comparative Bantu grammar are typically confronted with a huge amount of data and complex, interacting dimensions of variation. They tend to involve an initial methodological step of reducing this variation by classifying constructions, grammatical properties or entire languages into a finite set of types. This paper argues against such reductionist approaches to linguistic evidence and illustrates several methodological alternatives, one of which is here introduced as the scenario-based approach. I will argue that these alternative approaches are at least as good in managing data and finding generalisations as the reductionist approach, but that they give more reliable results and are better at discovering variation.
Mokhtar Ebrahimi, Nasrollah Emami, Ghodrat Ghasemipour
et al.
Aghraz Al-Seyasah Fi A'araz Al-Reyasah, authored by Zahiry Samarghandy has become one of the excellent and outstanding old prose texts, because of containing technical, political, social, philosophical, didactic, and ethical teachings and addressing governance practices. These practical and miscellaneous teachings have led to frequent transcriptions and insertion of significant distortions and falsifications into the text of the mentioned book. Jaafar Sheảr by having in hand four manuscripts of Aghraz Al-Seyasah but without benefitting all of them (specially Meshkảt᾿s transcript) has corrected and printed it in many cases mentioned the manuscript᾿s differences. Furthermore, negligence in trusteeship towards manuscripts, especially the base manuscript, hastiness in correction, and the weakness and indifference in typesetting have inserted some other distortions, falsifications, and errors in the aforesaid book. This study has tried to countercheck the printed copy of Aghraz Al-Seyasah with the base and Meshkảt᾿s manuscript, and then by comparing some phrases of it with the other works of Zahiry Samarghandy (Sandbadnameh and Ghorrat–al-Alfaz wa Nozhat-al-Alhaz) and writer᾿s stylistic norms analyze and correct some distortions falsifications and errors in the printed text of Aghraz Al-Seyasah.
Ronivaldo Moreira de Souza, Mauricio Ribeiro da Silva
Ao longo do processo de formação sócio-histórica do Brasil, os colonizadores construíram narrativas com imagens estereotipadas dos africanos escravizados e de sua religiosidade a partir de uma visão europeia e cristã. Mesmo depois da abolição da escravidão esses estereótipos permaneceram associados à religiosidade afro-brasileira e foram apropriadas pelas narrativas jornalísticas, contribuindo para reverberar essa estereotipia até o tempo presente. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar os estereótipos associados à religiosidade afro-brasileira na década de 1920 nas narrativas jornalísticas da imprensa carioca. Tendo como base os pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da Análise do Discurso de Escola Francesa, compomos o corpus da pesquisa com 24 textos, dos quais, dois são tomados para análise no artigo e considerados como representativos da seleção. Constatamos que nas narrativas analisadas a religiosidade afro-brasileira é demonizada, configurando a estereotipia.
The short story could be the media to teach something to the readers. “Two old cherry trees still in bloom” for example, is written by Saikaku. Through his work, Saikaku would like to show the readers the implementation of 4 identity-statuses. He brought the readers into critical reading to help them find the identity. To analyze the 4 identity status content in his short story, the coding analysis was used. By analyzing, it could be seen that 4 identity-status categories comprise identity diffusion, identity foreclosure, identity moratorium, and identity achievement. Each status has two codes like uncertainty and unknown in identity diffusion, admiration and sympathy in identity foreclosure, struggle and chasing in identity moratorium, and settle and completion in identity achievement. Through the analysis, Saikaku shows the readers that to harmonize oneself as an individual and community member, someone needs to develop his curiosity through implementing identity moratorium to satisfy his lacking of background knowledge. Moreover, developing a sense of love is very essential to keep someone digging something out sufficiently through identity foreclosure to reach the ultimate goal of life.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Computational linguistics. Natural language processing
Osmer Balam, M. C. P. Parafita Couto, Hans Stadthagen-González
Objectives/research questions: We investigate two understudied bilingual compound verbs that have been attested in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, ‘hacer + VInf’ and ‘estar + VProg’. Specifically, we examined speakers’ intuitions vis-à-vis the acceptability and preferential use of non-canonical and canonical hacer ‘to do’ or estar ‘to be’ bilingual constructions among bilinguals from Northern Belize, New Mexico and Puerto Rico. Methodology: Speakers from Northern Belize (n = 44), New Mexico (n = 32) and Puerto Rico (n = 30) completed a two-alternative forced-choice acceptability task and a language background questionnaire. Data and analysis: The data were examined using an analysis of variance and Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment. Conclusions: Whereas Northern Belizean bilinguals gave the highest ratings to ‘hacer + VInf’, both groups of US bilinguals gave preferential ratings to ‘estar + VProg’ bilingual constructions. On the other hand, Puerto Rican bilinguals gave the highest preferential ratings to the canonical estar bilingual compound verbs (i.e. estar + an English progressive verb) but rejected hacer bilingual compound verbs. While ‘hacer + VInf’ and ‘estar + VProg’ may represent variants that are available to Spanish/English bilinguals, the present findings suggest a community-specific distribution, in which hacer bilingual compound verbs are consistently preferred over estar bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize, whereas estar bilingual constructions are preferred among US bilinguals. Originality: This is the first cross-community examination of these bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize (Central America/Caribbean), New Mexico (Southwest US) and Puerto Rico (US/Caribbean), three contexts in the Spanish-speaking world characterized by long-standing Spanish/English language contact and the use of bilingual language practices. Implications: Findings underscore the importance of bilingual language experience in modulating linguistic competence and the necessity to study code-switching from a language ecological perspective, as subtle context-specific patterns in code-switching varieties may be manifested not only in bilingual speakers’ oral production but in intuition as well. A more fine-grained understanding of speakers’ judgments is vital to experimental studies that seek to investigate code-switching grammars both within and across communities where code-switching varieties of the same language pair are spoken.
Mei-Shin Wu, Nathanael E. Schweikhard, T. Bodt
et al.
Historical language comparison opens windows onto a human past, long before the availability of written records. Since traditional language comparison within the framework of the comparative method is largely based on manual data comparison, requiring the meticulous sifting through dictionaries, word lists, and grammars, the framework is difficult to apply, especially in times where more and more data have become available in digital form. Unfortunately, it is not possible to simply automate the process of historical language comparison, not only because computational solutions lag behind human judgments in historical linguistics, but also because they lack the flexibility that would allow them to integrate various types of information from various kinds of sources. A more promising approach is to integrate computational and classical approaches within a computer-assisted framework, “neither completely computer-driven nor ignorant of the assistance computers afford” [1, p. 4]. In this paper, we will illustrate what we consider the current state of the art of computer-assisted language comparison by presenting a workflow that starts with raw data and leads up to a stage where sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages have been identified and can be readily presented, inspected, and discussed. We illustrate this workflow with the help of a newly prepared dataset on Hmong-Mien languages. Our illustration is accompanied by Python code and instructions on how to use additional web-based tools we developed so that users can apply our workflow for their own purposes.
Jennifer A. Saxon, Jennifer C. Thompson, Jennifer Harris
et al.
Objective The precise relationship between frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is incompletely understood. The association has been described as a continuum, yet data suggest that this may be an oversimplification. Direct comparisons between patients who have behavioural variant FTD (bvFTD) with and without ALS are rare. This prospective comparative study aimed to determine whether there are phenotypic differences in cognition and behaviour between patients with FTD-ALS and bvFTD alone. Methods Patients with bvFTD or FTD-ALS and healthy controls underwent neuropsychological testing, focusing on language, executive functions and social cognition. Behavioural change was measured through caregiver interview. Blood samples were screened for known FTD genes. Results 23 bvFTD, 20 FTD-ALS and 30 controls participated. On cognitive tests, highly significant differences were elicited between patients and controls, confirming the tests’ sensitivities to FTD. bvFTD and FTD-ALS groups performed similarly, although with slightly greater difficulty in patients with ALS-FTD on category fluency and a sentence-ordering task that assesses grammar production. Patients with bvFTD demonstrated more widespread behavioural change, with more frequent disinhibition, impulsivity, loss of empathy and repetitive behaviours. Behaviour in FTD-ALS was dominated by apathy. The C9ORF72 repeat expansion was associated with poorer performance on language-related tasks. Conclusions Differences were elicited in cognition and behaviour between bvFTD and FTD-ALS, and patients carrying the C9ORF72 repeat expansion. The findings, which raise the possibility of phenotypic variation between bvFTD and FTD-ALS, have clinical implications for early detection of FTD-ALS and theoretical implications for the nature of the relationship between FTD and ALS.
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Jason Grafmiller, Laura Rosseel
Inspired by work in comparative sociolinguistics and quantitative dialectometry, we sketch a corpus-based method (Variation-Based Distance & Similarity Modeling—VADIS for short) to rigorously quantify the similarity between varieties and dialects as a function of the correspondence of the ways in which language users choose between different ways of saying the same thing. To showcase the potential of the method, we present a case study that investigates three syntactic alternations in some nine international varieties of English. Key findings include that (a) probabilistic grammars are remarkably similar and stable across the varieties under study; (b) in many cases we see a cluster of “native” (a.k.a. Inner Circle) varieties, such as British English, whereas “non-native” (a.k.a. Outer Circle) varieties, such as Indian English, are a more heterogeneous group; and (c) coherence across alternations is less than perfect.
One of the quintessential typological properties of the Bantu languages is their pervasive system of noun classes and noun class agreement. This is undoubtedly the aspect of their grammatical structure that is most discussed in the literature, if only because every grammar sketch of a Bantu language contains a section on noun classes. The most complete discussion can be found in Maho (1999). In contrast, the structure of the noun phrase has received little attention, which cannot be attributed to a lack of interesting features. This chapter briefly introduces aspects of the noun and noun phrase that are well studied, such as the noun class system and the different types of adnominal modifiers, and provides them with a reference. It also aims at filling some gaps in the literature. Section 2.2.2.2 provides a first systematic overview of the types of semantic agreement that can be found in the Bantu languages. Section 3 is entirely dedicated to the augment, a pervasive element in the grammar of the Bantu languages, of which the last comparative study (De Blois 1970) was in need of an update. The typologically unusual word order patterns that can be found in the Bantu languages receive a first comparative analysis and diachronic explanation in Section 5.
Abstract In bilingual child language acquisition research, a recurrent learnability issue has been to investigate whether and how cross-linguistic influence would interact with the non-adult patterns of omission/production of functional categories. In this paper, we analyze the omission/production of subject pronouns in the earliest stage English grammar and the earliest stage Spanish grammar of two English–Spanish simultaneous bilingual children (FerFuLice corpus in CHILDES). We base this analysis on Holmberg’s (2005, Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36. 533–564) and Sheehan’s (2006, The EPP and null subjects in Romance. Newcastle: Newcastle University PhD dissertation) formulation of the null subject parameter and on Liceras et al.’s (2012, Overt subjects and copula omission in the Spanish and the English grammar of English-Spanish bilinguals: On the locus and directionality of interlinguistic influence. First Language 32(1–2). 88–115) assumptions concerning the role of lexical specialization in cross-linguistic influence. We have conducted a comparative analysis of the patterns of production/omission of English and Spanish overt and null subjects in two bilingual children, on the one hand, versus the patterns of production/omission of one monolingual English child and one monolingual Spanish child, on the other. The results show that while there is no conclusive evidence as to whether or not English influences the higher production of overt subjects in child bilingual Spanish, the presence of null subjects in Spanish has a positive influence in the eradication of non-adult null subjects in bilingual English. We argue that in a bilingual situation, as compared to a monolingual one, lexical specialization in one of the languages of the bilinguals (the availability of an overt and a null realization of the subject in Spanish) facilitates the acquisition of the other language.
Abstract In the persistently sparse interlingual studies in the field of Construction Grammar, grammatical constructions are the main concern of research (Koch 2016; Boas and Ziem 2018), while constructional idioms, defined as form–meaning pairings with lexically fixed constituents and free lexical slots, have been analyzed mainly monolingually, with very few exceptions. See, amongst others, Dobrovol’skij and Pöppel (2017), Mollica and Schafroth (2018) and Mellado Blanco et al. (forthcoming). This lack of studies from a contrastive point of view may be related to the lexical underspecification of constructional idioms and to the difficulties in assessing their often high pragmatic potential. Against this background, the present paper aims to give impetus to the contrastive studies in the field of constructional idioms and Construction Grammar by means of the language pair German–Spanish. In order to achieve this goal, a multi-level corpus-based description method for the determination and analysis of interlingual equivalent constructional idioms at the lexicographical level was developed using five comparison parameters. The contrastive description model was successfully implemented on the comparative constructional idiom [von A so viel verstehen/Ahnung haben/sich auskennen wie X von/vom Y] (‘von A absolut nichts verstehen’) ([from A V to have as much understanding / knowledge as X from Y] (‘to understand absolutely nothing from A’)) and on its functionally equivalent construction in Spanish [Ventender/saber de A lo (mismo) que/como yo de X]. Both comparative constructions are characterized by their negation value and a pronounced ironic meaning, respectively. Their intralingual description from a constructional grammatical point of view represents a further goal of this paper.
According to usage-based models of phonology, the more frequently a word is used and perceived in accented pronunciation variants, the more exemplars of accented tokens are stored and then used for subsequent productions of this word. This may lead to greater production variability in speakers with more variable input than in speakers with less variable input (cf. Pierrehumbert, 2001). This contrasts with abstractionist theories and with proposals according to which children unconsciously filter out accent features. This study assesses the effects of variable input and lexical frequency on speech production by children (mean age 9;10) growing up with one or more languages and with exposure to regional varieties and foreign accents. In a picture-naming task, 60 children were tested on their production of eight German vowels. Children who experience more input variability produced more variable vowels in terms of greater Euclidean distances. Vowels in frequent words were produced with more variability than in infrequent words. Vowel position (F1) differed depending on language background (monolingual versus bilingual) and amount of input in regional varieties. The results imply that greater input variation can account for variable vowel production, in line with usage-based theories.
Abstract This paper addresses Iranian English as Foreign Language teachers and learners’ perceptions of explicit grammar instruction and corrective feedback and the effect of language background on learners’ perceptions of explicit grammar teaching. The research background indicates that explicit instruction and corrective feedback can play a significant part in the second language development. However, the extent to which their perceptions of the variables in the light of linguistic differences and learners’ language proficiency levels differ towards them remains a gap in the literature. To fill it, the study was conducted involving totally 360 Iranian Azeri and Persian EFL learners along with 100 teachers possessing the similar language backgrounds. Both groups received a validated questionnaire of Perceptions towards grammar instruction and corrective feedback. The respective data were analyzed non-parametrically such that the results revealed both the learners and the teachers held significantly different perceptions towards the grammar instruction. The differences mainly attributed to their language backgrounds affecting the way they perceive the world including education. The Persian EFL learners held more positive views than the Azeri EFL learners. They also hold a more neutral view. The findings of the present study contribute to the field of second language teaching. The findings may improve our understanding of grammar development and corrective feedback and enable us to incorporate effective methods of teaching grammar in the EFL classrooms through considering learners’ linguistic background and the context in which the target language is being taught.
Special aspects of education, Language acquisition
En aquest treball explorem la relació entre la codificació lèxica o gramatical de la referència a una entitat individual i la codificació oracional i discursiva de l’aspecte. Més particularment, observem la codificació de la referència a l’entitat Leo Messi (jugador de futbol) en relació amb (a) la modalitat de l’acció amb què el parlant presenta cada estat de coses en un enunciat i (b) el tipus aspectual dels segments de discurs que constitueixen combinacions coherents d’estats de coses, i ho fem a partir de l’anàlisi de dues notícies de premsa, una en català i l’altra en francès, sobre la concessió a Leo Messi, l’any 2017, de la quarta Bota d’Or.