Volume 15, Issue 1 -

This paper reports an innovative Chinese register study based on regression analysis for sentence length distribution and text clustering. Although end of sentence is not conventionally marked in Chinese, we resolve this issue by assuming that segments between periods, question marks, and exclamation marks are sentences, which can be further divided into simple sentences and compound sentences. We also assume that segments between punctuation marks that express pauses in utterances form sentences (i.e., clauses). Using regression analysis, we find that the frequency distribution of sentence and clause lengths in Chinese can be fitted by the formula F = aL b c L , where L is sentence/clause length. Texts from different registers give rise to different fitted values of the parameters, and hence can serve to differentiate these registers. Finally, we use these parameters to represent and cluster texts from different registers. The successful text clustering results further prove that the parameters of the fitted results are reliable linguistic characteristics for different registers. In terms of linguistic theories, our study shows that it is just as effective to model sentence length in Chinese using sociological words (i.e., characters) as it is using linguistic words.

This paper introduces keymorph analysis (KMA), a new extension of the discourse-probing technique of keyword analysis (KWA). While KWA focuses on lexicon and provides a key predominantly to textual topics and their semantic associations, KMA focuses on morphosyntactic features and captures more general characteristics of texts as wholes. Speeches by Czech(oslovak) presidents and corpus of contemporary written Czech SYN2015 are used to illustrate readers’ perception of situations and their participants in these texts. The paper also shows that different levels of morphosyntax facilitate interpretation of discourse: ideological differences can be observed with higher-level morphosyntactic features (parts of speech), while differences in speaker style are observable with lower-level morphosyntactic features (case, number, person, and their combinations).

We report on the results of an annotation experiment comparing naïve and expert coders in a sense disambiguation task consisting in the assignment of function labels to discourse markers (e.g. well, but, I mean ) in spoken French and English using a taxonomy specifically designed for speech. Our qualitative-quantitative assessment of its reliability led us to suggest fundamental revisions of the structure of the taxonomy, striving to find a better balance between reliability and granularity. The resulting model articulates two independent levels of annotation (domains and functions) which, once combined, provide a robust tool for the analysis of discourse markers and relate them to more general functions of spoken language.

The semantic similarity that characterizes two terms aligned in a metaphor is here analysed through a corpus-based distributional semantic space. We compare and contrast two samples of metaphors, representative of visual and linguistic modality of expressions respectively. Popular theories of metaphor claim that metaphors transcend their modality to influence conceptual structures, thus suggesting that different modalities of expression would typically express the same conceptual metaphors. However, we show substantial differences in the degree of similarity captured by the distributional semantic space with regard to the modality of expression (higher similarity for linguistic metaphors than for visual ones). We argue that this is due to two possible variables: Conventionality (linguistic metaphors are typically conventional, while visual are not) and Complexity (visual metaphors have modality-specific inner complexities that penalize the degree of similarity between metaphor terms captured by a language-based model). Finally, we compare the similarity scores of our original formulations with those obtained from different possible verbalizations of the same metaphors (acquired by replacing the metaphor terms with their semantic neighbours). We show that while this operation does not affect the average similarity between metaphor terms for visual metaphors, the similarity changes significantly in linguistic metaphors. These results are discussed here.

An important dimension of linguistic variation is formality. This study investigates the role of social distance between interlocutors. Twenty-five native Dutch speakers retold eight short films to confederates, who acted either formally or informally. Speakers were familiarized with the informal confederates, whereas the formal confederates remained strangers. Results show that the two types of interlocutors elicited different versions of the same stories. Formal interlocutors (i. e. large social distance) elicited lower articulation rates, and more nouns and prepositions, both indicators of explicit information. Speakers addressing the informal interlocutors, to whom social distance was small, however, provided more explicit information with an involved character (i. e. adjectives with subjective meanings). They also used the word and more often as a gap filler or as a way to keep the floor. Furthermore, a small social distance elicited more laughter, interjections, first-person pronouns and direct speech, which are all indicators of involvement, empathy and subjectivity.

In this paper, we demonstrate that, like frequency, morphosyntactic persistence can have a conserving effect on language change. To substantiate this claim, we analyze the alternation between the Spanish past subjunctive forms ending in –ra and –se (as in comiera and comiese ‘had eaten’). Due to the ongoing replacement of –se by –ra , persistence and frequency are the best predictors of the alternation in our data. First, the persistence effect of a prior –se is significantly greater than the persistence effect of a prior –ra . Second, although –se is basically restricted to third person singular morphology in contexts without persistence, when primed by –se this restriction is drastically reduced. Our results also shed light on the relationship between frequency and persistence in language change. Although both result in conservation, the conserving effect of frequency causes irregularity such as the paradigmatic atrophy of Spanish –se forms. In contrast, persistence can temporarily re-establish paradigmatic regularity and consequently strengthen the cognitive representation of obsolescing constructions. However, this resuscitating effect of persistence appears to be restricted to low-frequency –se forms; because they are generally more entrenched, the activation of high-frequency –se forms relies less on persistence effects.

This paper re-examines the semantics of Present-day English gerunds by analyzing their collocational preferences. While traditional approaches suggest that a semantic opposition between ‘actions’ and ‘facts’ determines the meaning as well as the distributional preferences of nominal ( the signing of the contract ) and verbal ( signing the contract ) gerunds, these claims have not been supported by quantitative evidence. At the same time, more recent studies which quantitatively and qualitatively analyze the meaning of gerunds from a referential perspective lack a distributional dimension. This study presents a semantic typology of the nouns and verbs that are attracted to nominal and verbal gerunds in noun and verb complementation structures by means of a distinctive collexeme analysis which has been applied to contextual collexemes. The analysis shows that, while nominal and verbal gerunds occur in clearly distinctive contexts, this distinction does not appear to be based on an action-fact dichotomy, but is rather determined by the more abstract features of conceptual (in)dependence and temporal flexibility. Finally, it is shown how these abstract semantic profiles can be filled in more concretely by specific contextual slots, thus arriving at a more fine-grained and dynamic perspective on the semantics of English gerunds.