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According to the theory of 'Social Interaction', second language acquisition occurs through interactions including mutual conversation (Vygotsky, 1978). However, how the input within the framework of interaction is made comprehensible is crucial. Interactive modifications during conversation facilitates language acquisition by providing comprehensible input. In this context, it has been put forward that the speakers of the target language contribute to the learners’ performance level. In this study, the effect of Second Life, three-dimensional on-line virtual environment providing learning opportunities to foreign language learners outside the classroom, on the process of interaction in foreign language has been examined. The findings suggest that Second Life provides social interaction and it can be used as an effective educational tool so as to communicate with native speakers, and learn about different cultures.
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The article examines the whole population of press_mouth collocation in order to explore the hypothesis of the construction as a basic linguistic unit used spontaneously by native speakers in discourse. The findings are relevant to foreign language learners especially whose own language (in this case Bulgarian) differs so dramatically from English.
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The paper discusses some basic social factors that shape language use and reflect cultural and behavioral traits characteristic of the particular speech community. The study is based on a corpus extracted from the BNC of the shake_hand(s) collocation. Social meaning is found in the variables of setting and social context participants (who is talking to whom), purpose and function of the interaction, etc. It can be measured along scales of power, familiarity, social status, etc. Basic linguistic features and devices are discussed: pre- and post-modification in NP structure, use of reference to people, of adverb and adverbial expressions. Sentence/clause types are also addressed.
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The CORILGA (Corpus Oral Informatizado de la Lengua Gallega) is a corpus of recordings aligned with their transcription and annotated at different levels (spelling, phonetic, morphological, syntactic...). A complete and thorough recordings and participants data allows, through an online open search engine, to get very accurate search results. This information could be used in language variation and change studies and to create materials for teaching or developing speech technology.
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The collective awareness of specialists in information technology (компьютерщики /айтишники), found in the folklore of their professional network, entirely belongs to the sphere of the comic (unlike in ``classical” folklore) and, hence, presents everyday problems through shortcuts, exaggerations and jokes. In Russian-speaking computer folklore, self-identification of programmers is grounded in their trade and language, rather than in ethnicity and citizenship, therefore the concept people is hardly activated; there is no patriotism or xenophobia. Programmers are indifferent to national differences. In their collective awareness, professional skill is the most important value and ethical requirements are reduced to the norms of professional discipline. A programmer views himself as a macho: he is successful both in a trade and with women. In computer folklore, sex is a frequent subject; love is much less frequent, and marriage or family are at the bottom of the list. Male chauvinism is in full swing and is aimed towards female programmers but also average female computer users. Male egoism is so natural and organic to programmers that it is hardly noticed by them.
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In our paper we describe a specific, Latvian two-word construction consisting of a verb preceded by an adverb derived from the same verb by the suffix -in-/-tin- (e.g. bērtin bērt). We are interested in how a given language element, apparently archaic and typical of Latvian folk songs (dainas), is used in today’s language. Some research questions are articulated, including one that goes beyond the specific realm of the Latvian language (how can these constructions be translated into other languages?). We search for the construction in the available Latvian corpora (LVK2018, lvTenTen14, InterCorp lv v11, Rainis and SENIE) and compare the resulting occurrences with a description in the current Latvian linguistic sources: both grammars and dictionaries. Deviations from the norm are treated descriptively in this article, as the speakers’ aim is to achieve a communication goal rather than their mistakes, as well as the creative development of this construction up to the present. The article is supplemented with an appendix: alphabetic lists of analysed lemmas along with their frequency.
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Sign language is the movements of the hand, the movements of the fingers, the arms or the movement of the body simultaneously with the face expressions to convey the ideas of the speaker. In recent years, the sign language is in the eyes of all researchers. It is possible to recognize the movements made with the help of sensors. However, it is of great importance to transfer the motion data to computer systems. As a result of the field study, it was determined that the studies conducted in this field were not sufficient at all. It was also found that the studies conducted were mainly in the field of the American Sign Language, the English Sign Language and the Arab Sign Language, and sufficient studies were not done in Turkish Sign Language. In this study, an intelligent system has been developed to facilitate the communication of hearing and speech impaired individuals with other individuals. The work done in this field is thought to help to remove the lack of information in this field. In the intelligent system developed in this Thesis, 33 basic signs in the Turkish Sign Language, which are called as sound informatics are taken as a basis in the study. The developed system uses the Microsoft Kinect v2 sensor to identify the signals. C# programming language and MongoDB are used in the developed system. As a result of the case study, 85% of the 33 basic signs were correctly recognized by the developed system. It is considered that the developed Sign Language recognition system should help both the hearing and speech impaired individuals, and also other individuals, and hopefully solve the problems of communication between these individuals.
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We are proposing a method to investigate changes in historical discourse by using large bodies of text and word embedding models. As a case study, we investigate discussions in Dutch Parliament about the punishment of war criminals in the period 1945–1975. We will demonstrate how word embedding models, trained with Google’s Word2Vec algorithm, can be used to trace historical developments in parliamentary vocabulary through time.
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The article presents an analysis of linguistic methods of communication present on the official website of the Polish Ministry of the Environment. Described are the language and style of communication used in the main part of the website and in the content of Ministry’s entries on the social networking site – Facebook. A separate chapter was dedicated to the linguistic correctness of texts the authority directs to Internet users.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt’s accent is often used as an illustration of the elite pronunciation heard among the north-eastern US upper classes until roughly the mid 20th century. Known under several names and often considered a mixture of British and American features, this variety is frequently identified with the American Theatre Standard, a norm popularized by acting schools in the early 20th century. Working on the assumption that Roosevelt is an exemplar of the north-eastern standard, the aim of the current study is a preliminary acoustic exploration of his accent with the aim of assessing the plausibility of such comparisons, focusing on the dress, trap, bath, start and lot vowels. Density plots created based on F1 and F2 measured in eight radio speeches were used to examine the relative position of these vowels in the vowel space. Linear mixed-effects regression was then used to model F1 and F2 in selected pairs of vowels to determine whether the differences along the two formant dimensions are significant. The results confirm a conclusion reached in an earlier auditory study (Brandenburg, Braden 1952) according to which Roosevelt’s bath was variable between [æ] and a lower and retracted [a], a vowel quality found in Eastern New England and in American Theatre Pronunciation. At the same time, a merged start/lot vowel in Roosevelt’s speech makes it unjustified to fully identify his accent with the latter variety.
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The attribution of content of Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch) journals, in which many anonymous and pseudonymous articles have been published, presents many challenges for the researchers. In the XIX–XX centuries, a corpus of texts, which were unambiguously attributed to F. M. Dostoevsky, M. M. Dostoevsky, A. A. Grigoriev, N. N. Strakhov and other Vremya and Epokha authors, was formed on the basis of traditional documentary (letters, payroll, income and expense book, memoirs), ideological and thematic and stylistic evidence. The following types of texts were isolated within the corpus of anonymous and pseudonymous articles: author’s and collective articles, editorial inserts, notes; by type of writing — authorship, co-authorship, editing and adaptation of others texts. Modern methods of statistical analysis of formal grammatical and syntactic parameters in the text can provide sufficient grounds for expanding the source attribution base. This article presents the results of a study of a number of anonymous articles in the Dostoevsky brothers’ journals using three statistical methods of attribution: linguistic and statistical analysis according to the G. Kjetsaa’s method, the Transformer neural network and the Random forest algorithm. These results need to be correlated; they should be taken into account as complementary to traditional attribution methods.
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Over the past years, the Internet has become a tool of communication among different people in the world. Due to the spread of the Internet, many researchers have focused their attention on the study of language use through the Internet. Code-switching is one of the sociolinguistic phenomena that have been observed in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). The present paper explores the sociolinguistic phenomenon of code-switching in computer mediated communication by Jordanians. The study highlighted several English words that have been utilized for code-switching through online interaction. Furthermore, it studied the participants’ views about the role of Facebook in mixing Arabic with English. The methodology used in this study was descriptive, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. An online questionnaire was shared on Facebook pages and groups. The sample included 181 participants; in addition, 35 interviews took place at home with relatives, with neighbors and in shops. The results revealed several perspectives about code-switching. Some participants mentioned that Facebook has led them to code-switch by using the most frequently switched words, such as; comment, like, group, share. Nevertheless, other participants mentioned that they prefer to use Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and avoid using any English words in online activities, which means that Facebook has no impact on their language. A higher percentage of participants agreed that Facebook plays a role in mixing Arabic with English
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The verbal and structural features of the reader comment, a genre of Internet communication, were studied. The method of sentiment analysis (ParallelDots API) was used to reveal and measure the emotive component of the reader comments (N = 3000) in the English and Russian languages. The results obtained were verified by the manual linguistic text analysis. The experts were specialists in the field of philology of the English and Russian languages (N = 6), students of philology, as well as native speakers of the Russian language for whom English is a foreign language, i.e., their level of proficiency is C1 (N = 4). As a result of the comparison of the data collected through the automated and manual text processing, a number of factors that reduce the reliability of the results of automated sentiment analysis of the reader comments were singled out. Difficulties hindering the objective determination of the sentiment by the program were found in the reader comments in both analyzed languages. This is indicative of the structural similarities between the English and Russian reader comments at the lexical and syntactic levels. The feasibility of the mixed automated and manual text processing in order to obtain more detailed and objective data was demonstrated. The results of this work can be used for comparative studies of two or more languages performed by the method of sentiment analysis, as well as for drawing parallels between the lexical, grammatical, and cultural components of languages.
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The Menzerath–Altmann law on the relationship between the length of linguistic units and the length of their components is one of the important laws of quantitative linguistics. This law is a result of an advanced linguistic structures organization and is of great importance for the modern theory of language aimed at revealing the relations between qualitative features and quantitative parameters of the language. The validity of the Menzerath–Altmann law has been confirmed in a number of works on languages with different morphological structures. The main purpose of this paper is empirical testing of the Menzerath–Altmann law on the Tatar language with the help of various fiction texts (both poetry and prose). The distribution of word forms in the Tatar language by length, observed values of the average syllable length depending on the word length, average values of the syllable length predicted by the model, as well as the model parameters were investigated for the analyzed texts. To assess the goodness of fitting of the model, the coefficient of determination R 2 , which for different texts ranged from 0.676 to 0.999, was used. It was concluded that G. Altman’s formula is in good agreement with the data of the Tatar language. The model predicts not only the decreasing average syllable length with the increasing word length (function monotonicity), but also its subsequent increasing (change in the function monotonicity) for a number of texts.
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In recent decades, new technologies have evolved so rapidly that the use of computers and the Internet has resulted in the appearance of a new type of genre, i.e. Cybergenre (Shepherd & Watters, 1998; Shepherd, Watters & Kennedy, 2004). The medium used by these new genres, their social role, their purpose, their audiences and kinds of skills required to their users differ from those of old genres, and therefore, cybergenres cannot be measured or characterized by means of the same parameters as traditional written (paper format) genres. On the other hand, some authors have described three types of “Reading Modes”, such as ‘Navigating’, ‘Browsing’, and ‘Reading’ (Girón-García, 2013), regarding different Internet users’ strategies. Our hypothesis is that the type of reading mode –or user strategic mode- not only has to do with types of users and their tendencies but also with the cybergenre itself, its configuration and the types of cognitive frames that it activates in users. Each particular genre activates certain metaphorical models –made apparent through metaphorical expressions– that configure the necessary paths for users to succeed in its adequate processing. In this context, our purpose here is to identify idiosyncratic metaphorical expressions that may guide the movement of the user thought texts precisely because they activate cognitive models. In turn, we provide descriptions of metaphorical models and try to explain and illustrate their coherence within particular genres. Therefore, our procedure consists firstly in selecting genres, such as on-line dictionaries and market sites, secondly identifying metaphorical expressions, and finally describing the models they activate, so that we can elucidate different user strategic modes (reading modes) for each genre type. We claim that different guiding metaphors of topological character (spatial) prompt different users’ techniques or strategies. In addition, we suggest that these metaphors provide internal coherence to the genres, as such.
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The development of public engagement technologies has provided new ways of ensuring societal participation. Public engagement events developed by various institutions provide ways to combine learning about cultural heritage with individual participants. Poetry readings serve as one of the ways the sound of Latvian literature and particularly Latvian classical poetry can be updated. The authors of this article analyse the first two public engagement actions, “Skandē Veidenbaumu” and “Lasīsim dzejiņas”, of the series “Lasi skaļi” (Read Aloud) launched by the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art of the University of Latvia. During these events, participants were given the opportunity to record thematically-selected poems in the audio recording booth of the Latvian National Library or, as an alternative, to record a poem on their computer or mobile device and upload them to the action site. The events combined the creation of a recorded body of poetry readings with related educational content and represent one of the newer educational methods for reaching the general public and some of its subgroups (children, pupils, students, etc.). Through these events, the public was given the opportunity to become acquainted with Latvian cultural heritage while simultaneously creating new cultural artifacts. The participants creatively used different approaches of performance, recording the poems in a variety of voices, singing, or even incorporating digital sound processing programmes. They actively seized on the opportunity to create new versions of poems that had already been set to music. The main reasons for rejecting any particular recording were buffoonery or cursing during the recording process, or having left the recording unfinished. Both events resulted in more than 4,500 audio recordings which were then stored in the digital archive of the Institute. The set of recordings could be of interest to researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics and computer linguistics, as it provides a unique representation of pronunciation during a specific period of time performed by people of different ages, genders, and nationalities.
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In the analysis of grammatical terminology, we can identify a methodological description of the verbal category of tense common to both Italian and Romanian. That could be taken to account for the fact that these two languages feature the same main moods and tenses, but with some different nuances from the point of view of verbal or temporal aspect. Our study aims to present and analyse such differences between Italian and Romanian, with a major focus on those encountered in the verbal category of tense. The present paper is intended to view tense from the morphosyntactic vantage point (verbal tenses of the finite moods), with the lexical stance (adverbs, prepositional phrases) to be documented in subsequent research.
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The article discusses the multilingualism of students with Ukrainian background who study German philology in Poland. It presents results of a pilot study on students’ experiences with multilingual education. The respondents’ statements, collected in in-depth interviews, reveal subjective perceptions of their own language biographies. Their education towards multilingualism began with an early Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism since they were raised in a bilingual environment in Ukraine. Moreover, the development of multilingual competence was largely influenced by their family environment. It can be concluded that early experiences with bilingualism, openness to languages in the family and parental support in learning other foreign languages can positively influence education towards multilingualism.
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