Volume 2, Issue 1

This paper explicates the precise meaning of weak generic sentences of the form Ks are P, best represented by the Port Royal Puzzle sentence Dutchmen are good sailors. The sentence is true even though the majority of Dutchmen do not know how to sail at all and a fortiori do not sail well. Two observations motivate my analysis. One is that weak generic sentences express a property that “distinguishes the subject referent from other entities that might belong to the same category” (Krifka et al. 1995). This leads to the use of alternative set in my analysis. The other observation is that the scale structure of the predicate P affects the availability of weak generic reading for sentences of the form Ks are P. I argue that the interpretation of weak generic sentences involves: (i) partitioning the set of entities denoted by the bare plural subject based on the property denoted by the predicate P; (ii) partitioning the set of entities alternative to the denotation of the subject in a similar fashion; and (iii) comparing an appropriate partition in (i) to its counterpart in (ii) with respect to the predicate P. The Port Royal Puzzle sentence is true if and only if: those Dutchmen who can sail and who are good at sailing in comparison with the Dutch-internal standard of being good at sailing and those international citizens who can sail and who are good at sailing in comparison to the international standard of being good at sailing are such that the former population generally have better sailing skills than the latter population.

In an artificial language-learning task, two groups of English and French participants learned one of two language rules: 1) stress the first heavy (CVC) syllable, else the first syllable, or, 2) stress the first light (CV) syllable, else the first syllable. French and English participants were chosen to compare learning outcomes by speakers of different native stress systems, fixed and variable. Participants were trained on the target language by listening to a set of nonsense familiarization words exemplifying the stress rule. This was followed by a forced-choice task to choose the correct version of the words they had just learned. Following the training procedure, participants were tested on novel words with the same stress pattern to which they were familiarized. The result of the novel word testing was that the natural rule with stress on heavy syllables was learned significantly better than the unnatural, stress light syllables, rule. To account for the learnability of both the natural and the unnatural rules, I argue for the interaction of a general cognitive mechanism that facilitates learning in general and a domain-specific language mechanism that can access universal phonological principles to aid in learning a natural language rule.

The Lithuanian language is a typical flectional language that has a very sophisticated system of grammatical forms and many means of derivation; it is also characterized by uncertain boundaries between morphemes. All this makes the morphemic analysis of the Lithuanian language very complex. The aim of this research is to define and describe morphemic structural models of inflective parts of speech (i.e. nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns, and verbs) and regularities of their usage in contemporary Lithuanian.

This research paper takes and builds upon Slobin’s (1987) thinking-for-speaking hypothesis as a basis for exploring the notion of conceptual transfer from the L1 in the acquisition and production of motion events in an L2. This is achieved by investigating the extent to which L2 transfer presents itself in the expression of motion in inverse translation tasks carried out by 27 native English speaking learners of Spanish and 32 native Spanish speaking learners of English. The nature of this transfer is then investigated to establish whether or not it appears to be conceptual. The tasks presented to participants contained items based on Talmy’s (1985) research on cross-linguistic lexicalisation patterns in the expression of motion events, which, as Slobin (1987, 1996) later proposes, appear to dictate the conceptualisation of motion events in a language. Results reveal that cognitive parameters in the participants’ native language affected their performance in the production of motion events in their second language, in accord with Slobin’s (1987) thinking-for-speaking hypothesis. Finally, the study concludes with a summary of these results.

We present an Integrated Contrastive Model of non-numerical quantificational NPs (NNQs, i.e. ‘some people’) produced by L1 English speakers and Mandarin and Korean L2 English learners. Learner corpus data was sourced from the ICNALE (Ishikawa, 2011, 2013) across four L2 proficiency levels. An average 10% of L2 NNQs were specific to L2 varieties, including noun number mismatches (*‘many child’), omitting obligatory quantifiers after adverbs (*‘almost people’), adding unnecessary particles (*‘all of people’) and non-L1 English-like quantifier/noun agreement (*‘many water’). Significantly fewer ‘openclass’ NNQs (e.g a number of people) are produced by L2 learners, preferring ‘closed-class’ single lexical quantifiers (following L1-like use). While such production is predictable via L1 transfer, Korean L2 English learners produced significantly more L2-like NNQs at each proficiency level, which was not entirely predictable under a transfer account. We thus consider whether positive transfer of other linguistic forms (i.e. definiteness marking) aids the learnability of other L2 forms (i.e. expression of quantification).

Generative Linguistics proposes that the human ability to produce and comprehend language is fundamentally underwritten by a uniquely linguistic innate system called Universal Grammar (UG). In her recent paper What is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it? Ewa Dabrowska reviews a range of evidence and argues against the idea of UG from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. In the current paper, I take each of Dabrowska’s arguments in turn and attempt to show why they are not well founded, either because of flaws in her argumentation or because of a careful consideration of the available empirical evidence. I also attempt to demonstrate how evidence from the fields Dabrowska reviews actually supports the notion of UG. However, arguments are additionally presented in favor of integrating an understanding of domain-specific UG with an understanding of domain-general cognitive capacities in order to understand the language faculty completely.

The consequence of globalization in many bilingual and multilingual communities appears to be the increased endangerment of language varieties and the speeding erosion of linguistic diversity. Understanding this concern and its associated issues of language contact, conflict, and maintenance may be considerably enhanced by exploring attitudes of communities towards the language varieties they live with. In this exploratory study we investigate attitudes of a group of bilingual Farsi-Azerbaijani speakers in the Iranian city of Tabriz towards the Azerbaijani language. Based on questionnaire data and semistructured interviews, the study explores the participants’ emotional attitudes towards Azerbaijani as well as their position regarding its application in some domains of language use. The study depicts the participants’ positive emotions and feelings towards their local language but at the same time reveals their hesitation and reservations in approving of its use in some domains of language use, education and new media in particular. On this basis, we argue that the safe status of a language even with the magnitude of Azerbaijani in Iran cannot be taken for granted and further comprehensive and in-depth research may be needed in this regard.

In North Sámi, verbs that form transitivity alternation pairs are always distinguished morphologically. However, even if morphology is seen as a reflex of the syntax, the syntactic structure underlying transitive and intransitive verbs in North Sámi cannot be directly read off from the morphology. Since the verbalisers have vocalic phonological realisations with some roots but consonantal realisations with others, and since consonantal realisations give the verb an additional syllable, one can get the impression that in some transitivity alternation pairs the transitive verb is derived from the intransitive verb, whereas in other pairs it is the other way round, and that in still other pairs both verbs are derived from a common base. On closer inspection it nevertheless appears that while in some cases the transitive verb is actually formed from the intransitive verb by causativisation, in other cases the transitive verb differs from its intransitive counterpart only in involving a Voice head. In addition, the language has a type of intransitive verb that are marked anticausatives, meaning that they have an expletive Voice head. The main difference between these verbs and the corresponding transitive verbs is the properties of Voice.

This article presents an argument for the idea that consonants of high sonority are preferred over low-sonority consonants between vowels (Uffmann 2007). The argument is based on a detailed description and analysis of the phonological patterns which ensure that a syllable starts with a consonant in Washo. Washo inserts [j], which is of high sonority, between any two vowels. Word-initially however a glottal stop is inserted. It is argued that the Washo insertion patterns show influence of the sonority requirements, and these patterns are not subject to an analysis in terms of autosegmental spreading. Thus although feature spreading is a useful tool for capturing similarity requirements on neighboring segments, it is not sufficient to account for cases like Washo epenthesis.

Discourse markers in this paper are examined from a relevance theoretic perspective which highlights their contribution to the process of inference and are considered elements that encode procedural meaning. A total of 24 participants from three Arabic speaking countries: Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt took part in the study. The data used for the study was elicited through two tasks: informal multi-party conversation and structured interviews. The results show how the meaning of causality as a pragmatic variable (Schneider & Barron 2008; Terkourafi 2011) is realized by means of different pragmatic variants. Using a Relevance Theoretic framework (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995; Blakemore, 1987), this paper argues that DMs signal pragmatic inferences that are performed by the addressee. The choice of variants is found to be shaped by broad social categories as well as socio-psychological choices made by the individual (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985).

This paper examines the construction of figurative language within the approach to metaphoric complexes provided by the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM). This approach specifies the ways in which metaphors or metaphors and metonymies operate together at different levels of meaning construction, forming metaphtonymies, metaphoric amalgams and metaphoric chains. The study introduces a pattern of metaphoric complexes that involves two different kinds of comparisons operating together: Comparison by resemblance and comparison by contrast. The observations obtained from the study are: i) metaphoric complexes can be more complex than indicated by the LCM approach to the phenomena and ii) the cognitive operations (or conceptual mappings) involved in the construction of complex figures do not simply underlie a plausible interpretation of such figures; they can also bear illocutionary force and thus affect thought and culture. The points are demonstrated by examining the above-mentioned pattern in some religious figures, analysing the effect the construction of such figures has had on readers’ beliefs and behaviour (i.e. thought and culture).

This paper studies articulatory, acoustic and perceptual characteristics of Mandarin Chinese emotional utterances as produced by two speakers, expressing Neutral, Angry, Sad and Happy emotions. Articulatory patterns were recorded using ElectroMagnetic Articulography (EMA), together with acoustic recordings. The acoustic and articulatory analysis revealed that Happy and Angry were generally higherpitched, louder, and produced with a more open mouth than Neutral or Sad. Sad is produced with low back tongue dorsum position and Happy, with a forward position, and for one speaker, duration was longer for Angry and Sad. Moreover, F1 and F2 are more dispersed (i.e., hyperarticulated) in emotional speech than Neutral speech. Perception tests conducted with 18 native listeners suggest that listeners were able to perceive the expressed emotions far above chance level. The louder and higher pitched the utterance, the more emotional the speech tends to be perceived. We also explore specific articulatory and acoustic correlates of each type of emotional speech, and how they impact perception.

This article discusses the interaction between modality, point of view and ideology in Abiezer Coppe’s A Remonstrance (1651), a letter of protestation written in prison by one of the most infamous radical thinkers of England in the 1650’s. Point of view is one the most fruitful topics of stylistic enquiry, in particular in its interaction with modality as carrier of ideological effects, but, as recent studies amply demonstrate, it is advisable to adopt a heuristic methodology integrating a code-driven approach with a use-driven model in order to account for a wider variety of expressive means for the realisation of modality. As this article tries to show, in Coppe’s text this modal function is mainly performed by periodic sentences and digressions, which act as modalizing structures in the text and, together with the creation of weak implicatures, introduce a destabilizing element with clear ideological implications. The stylistic analysis of A Remonstrance shows how this apparently sincere protestation of innocence is in fact a layered, polysemous text that problematizes the idea itself of sincerity, uses a varied set of modalizing elements to convey an alternative point of view, and produces interstitial (even subversive) reading possibilities.

Algerian Arabic, in general, and the Djelfa dialect, in particular, are receptive to French words. But such borrowing is not unsystematic as they are adapted in a way compatible with the morphological and phonological system of the recipient dialect as well as preserving as much information as possible from the source language. This paper focuses on the morphological nativization of French loanwords in the Djelfa dialect with special reference to some phonological processes, viz., epenthesis, assimilation and devocalization that are used to rehabilitate the illicit syllable structures resulting from such morphological adaptation within Optimality Theory.

Other-initiated repair is an essential interactional practice to secure mutual understanding in everyday interaction. This article presents evidence from a large conversational corpus of a sign language, showing that signers of Argentine Sign Language (Lengua de Señas Argentina or ‘LSA’), like users of spoken languages, use a systematic set of linguistic formats and practices to indicate troubles of signing, seeing and understanding. The general aim of this article is to provide a general overview of the different visual-gestural linguistic patterns of other-initiated repair sequences in LSA. It also describes the quantitative distribution of other-initiated repair formats based on a collection of 213 cases. It describes the multimodal components of open and restricted types of repair initiators, and reports a previously undescribed implicit practice to initiate repair in LSA in comparison to explicitly produced formats. Part of a special issue presenting repair systems across a range of languages, this article contributes to a better understanding of the phenomenon of other-initiated repair in terms of visual and gestural practices in human interaction in both signed and spoken languages.

We provide an annotated coding scheme for other-initiated repair, along with guidelines for building collections and aggregating cases based on interactionally relevant similarities and differences. The questions and categories of the scheme are grounded in inductive observations of conversational data and connected to a rich body of work on other-initiated repair in conversation analysis. The scheme is developed and tested in a 12-language comparative project and can serve as a stepping stone for future work on other-initiated repair and the systematic comparative study of conversational structures.

The aim of this paper is to conduct an exploratory study and compare the development of pointing and its specific use as self-reference in French sign language (LSF) with the development of pointing and self reference in French. Personal reference is expressed through nominal expressions and pronouns in French. In LSF, the signs used for personal reference have the same form as pointing gestures, which are present in children’s communication system from the age of 10-11 months (Bates et. al 1977, Clark 1978). Continuity between pointing gestures and signs is questioned by Bellugi & Klima (1981) and Petitto (1986), who indicate that signing children’s pre-linguistic pointing gestures are different from signs and correspond to two distinct categories: indexical and symbolic. We present arguments for a continuity hypothesis between pointing gestures and signs. We coded two longitudinal datasets of a French-speaking child and a French Sign Language signing child aged seven months to three years, filmed at home with their mothers once a month. Our analyses enabled us to underline the continuity between the deaf child’s pointing gestures and their incorporation as markers of personal reference into the child’s sign language system.

The two symmetrical manual articulators (the hands) in signed languages are a striking modalityspecific phonetic property. The weak hand can maintain the end position of an articulation while the other articulator continues to produce additional signs. This weak hand spreading (hold) has been analysed from various perspectives, highlighting its prosodic, syntactic, or discourse properties. The present study investigates corpus data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) and Russian Sign Language (RSL), two unrelated sign languages, in order to question the necessity of a sign-language specific notion of ‘buoy’ introduced in the discourse analysis of American Sign Language by Liddell (2003). Buoys are defined as weak hand holds that serve as a visible landmark throughout a stretch of discourse, and several types are distinguished based on their function and form. In the analysis of nearly two and a half hours of narratives and conversations from NGT and RSL, we found over 600 weak hand holds. We show that these holds can be analysed in terms of regular phonetic, syntactic, semantic, or discourse notions (or a combination thereof) familiar from the linguistic study of spoken languages, without the need for a sign language-specific notion of ‘buoy’.

Despite their central role in question formation, content interrogatives in spontaneous conversation remain relatively under-explored cross-linguistically. This paper outlines the structure of ‘where’ expressions in Duna, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, and examines where-questions in a small Duna data set in terms of their frequency, function, and the responses they elicit. Questions that ask ‘where?’ have been identified as a useful tool in studying the language of space and place, and, in the Duna case and elsewhere, show high frequency and functional flexibility. Although where-questions formulate place as an information gap, they are not always answered through direct reference to canonical places. While some question types may be especially “socially costly” (Levinson 2012), asking ‘where’ perhaps provides a relatively innocuous way of bringing a particular event or situation into focus.

Rather than using abstract directionals, speakers of the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinhpatha make reference to locations of interest using named landmarks, demonstratives and pointing. Building on a culturally prescribed avoidance for certain placenames, this study reports on the use of demonstratives, pointing and landmarks for direction giving. Whether or not pointing will be used, and which demonstratives will be selected is determined partly by the relative epistemic incline between interlocutors and partly by whether information about a location is being sought or being provided. The reliance on pointing for the representation of spatial vectors requires a construal of language that includes the visuo-corporal modality.

People make reference to places in the variable formulations afforded by their languages and to multiple ends that in addition to picking out a referent, simultaneously build conceptual common ground about seen and unseen landscapes, including moral stances about the social geography. This paper examines the different ways that Lachixío Zapotec speakers of Oaxaca, Mexico, formulate and interpret place references in the dialogic narratives of their conversations. I examine sequences of interaction within stories that emerged in conversations as joint social actions. These sequences include both speakers’ place formulations and addressees’ responses that publically display their uptake and stances toward the references. I describe resources of the Lachixío Zapotec language for referencing place and show how place references are entangled with person references, references to historical events, and participants’ moral stances toward such references. Through examining references to locations within sequences of conversational story telling we gather some evidence for how conceptual common ground and moral value is developed through the step-wise progression of turn-taking and how stances about places come to be culturally shared or contested between interlocutors dialogically.

This study describes the introduction of verbal idioms in the Galician language version (Galnet) of the semantic network WordNet; a network that does not traditionally include many phraseological units. To enhance Galnet, a list of 803 Galician verbal idioms was developed to then review each of them individually and assess whether they could be introduced in an existing WordNet synset (a group of synonyms expressing the same concept) or not. Of those 803 idioms, 490 (61%) could be included in this network. Besides, Galnet was enlarged with 750 extra verbal idioms, most of them synonyms or variants of the former. In this study, we present the working methodology for the experiment and an analysis of the results, to help understand the most important problems found when trying to introduce idioms in Galnet. We also discuss the reasons preventing the inclusion of some expressions, and the criteria used to introduce the idioms that finally made it into the network.

The aim of this paper is to study twelve modern Dictionaries of Neologisms (DN) in six different languages: Catalan, English, French, Galician, Italian and Spanish. I systematically analysed an array of relevant parameters in lexicographical works of this type. First, the two criteria most used by the DNs to identify the eligible lexical units are: the lexicographical (based on the use of a control corpus) and the chronological criterion. Second, I described and analysed in depth the macrostructure (origin of entries, variants, parts-of-speech) and the microstructure (definitions and senses, citations, examples and contexts, dating and thematic fields) of the DNs. From a general perspective, these DNs are grouped into three types: those developed by an author, by publishing houses and by Observatories of Neology – each with different objectives and methodologies. Third, I have tried to summarize the main strengths and weaknesses of these DNs, and I propose a number of contents and measures intended in particular to improve modern DNs. Finally, I conclude that in the 21st century we can indeed speak of a “neological lexicography”.

In this article, we consider the problems normally associated with bilingual phraseography and the paradigm that should be used to guide its development. We first present the fundamental aspects that should be taken into account in the characterization of bilingual phraseography. Secondly, we give a general overview of both theoretical and practical bilingual phraseography, paying special attention to the main problems existing in this area. Thirdly, we consider the factors that can determine the development of bilingual phraseography, starting from the notion of the “user needs paradigm” and the contributions from the Function Theory of Lexicography. Finally, we make a brief summary of the main ideas dealt with in the article.

Paroemias, or brief and sententious statements, constitute a linguistic treasure trove which is not always easy to compile. This is particularly so for paroemias of popular use, such as proverbs, due to their complex nature (metaphorical meaning, frequent suppression of lexical elements, use of archaic expressions and words, employment of rhetorical figures and so on). They are also expressions of popular wisdom handed down through oral tradition from generation to generation within a largely rural culture. Moreover, since many of these popular proverbs have fallen into disuse, they have become less understood, and therefore, less used. Despite the problems posed by paroemiographical work, there exist many collections dedicated to recording proverbs in popular use, in particular sayings, for their linguistic, didactic and ethnolinguistic value. This paper addresses the paremiographical work on proverbs carried out in Spain in order to take stock of the said work from the end of the 19th century to the present. Then it analyses the paroemigraphical approaches used, the results obtained and their usefulness in paroemiological research. Furthermore, the application of new technologies to paroemiography and the enhancements which they have contributed, are also examined.

In this study, I examine narratives of belonging through a corpus of digital diasporic discourse. The corpus is based on a Nigerian online discussion forum; its users primarily consist of both local Nigerians and members of the globally dispersed Nigerian diaspora. The study sets out by providing a working definition of narratives of belonging couched in the sociolinguistic tradition of approaching narrative structures. This includes aspects of personal narration, structural features, and reference to concepts that are salient in the construction of belonging. From this preliminary definition, retrieval strategies are developed to identify narratives of belonging in a large-scale dataset through a combination of manual and automated searches. The dataset of narratives is then analyzed, both in terms of structural features such as length and variation in narrative complexity, as well as linguistic properties, such as code-switching and the use of toponyms. Finally, these analyses are used to identify emerging topic strands and recurring themes in these narratives of belonging. It can be argued that such codifications of the diasporic experience are created and reinforced through individuated stories. Narratives of belonging, in other words, systematically contribute to the identity work performed in and by a digital diasporic community.

Selfies have by now earned a prominent place in the diverse forms of self-representation on social media. In sociolinguistic terms, they have been undergoing a process of enregisterment (Agha 2005), as attested to in moral panics in public discussions and in a developing selfie-related lexicon. A phenomenon worthy of study then, yet largely unexplored, particularly within discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives on identities (possibly due to the selfie’s visual nature). My aim in this article is to venture (and justify) a ‘claiming’ of selfies by small stories. Selfies present the semiotic hallmarks of small stories, as I will show, and so they constitute valuable ‘data’, the study of which can benefit from small stories inquiry into genres as communicative and social practices on social media. Small stories apparatus is well-suited to selfie analysis: it has been specifically developed to account for genres that challenge the assumptions and modes of analysis of conventional narrative and life writing studies. Using data of selfie postings by adolescent women on FB, I will show how within a small stories framework, far from being narcissistic expressions of ‘ideal selves’, selfies emerge as contextualized and co-constructed presentations of self, shaped by media affordances.

This study focuses on the reconstruction of experience in the online environment of the Pick-up Artist (PUA) community forums and aims to uncover yet another facet of personal narrative, namely the role and performance of framing in the reporting of events. Discursive psychologists have often pointed out that a narrative is not a precise reflection of reality but a device that itself shapes the social world because reality always under-determines the verbal representation of events. In this study, we show how the verbalisation of narrative guides the reader towards the intended understanding by establishing the shared knowledge schema in the community of practice. Utilising data from a specific genre in the PUA forums, the “field reports” (i.e. narrative reconstructions of encounters between the PUAs and women), we describe three pertinent layers of frames, how they are evoked linguistically and how they interact with each other. Our investigation of the hierarchical framing of the interaction as [pua training], [personal narrative] and [success report] shows that they are based on group-specific knowledge schemas but, at the same time, draw on conventionalised narrative structures.

This paper investigates and compares the functions of narrative passages in three computermediated health practices centering on advice-giving: (1) email counseling at a UK university, (2) online forums providing peer support for quitters of smoking, and (3) anti-smoking websites by UK governmental, commercial and charitable institutions. We found that the functions of the narrative passages are manifold and often overlapping. They range from seeking advice, giving advice, indicating/seeking agreement, supporting a claim, showing compliance with advice given to reporting on progress and success. In a second step, these insights were linked to how the narrative passages were used for identity construction and relational work. The results show that narratives are employed to create various identities, such as authentic advice-seekers, active self-helpers, successful quitters and advice-givers. Our comparison reveals that narrative functions utilized in all three practices exhibit nuanced differences due to medium factors and interactional goals of the practices. Finally, in these contexts of self-improvement, narratives document stability or transformation in the sense of clients’ improved health and smokers’ change to becoming non-smokers respectively.

This paper focuses on self-presentation in dating ads and the strategies advertisers employ to construct their persona to attract and initiate responses from the desired other. Dating ads have experienced considerable structural changes in their transition from print media to online forms. The use of diverse media and interaction forms as well as extended space has resulted in a diversification of possibilities in online partner search in which advertisers use fragmented stories, past and anticipated narratives in order to construct a basic personal narrative. It is argued here that the act of posting the dating ads also functions as part of the advertisers’ life story with the projected end of finding romance or fulfilling other relational goals. The analysis of examples from a corpus of Caribbean dating ads also shows how advertisers make use of particular cultural references, lexical items and spelling adaptations in their creation of an authentic Caribbean persona and as a means to establish common ground with a potential partner.

Using readers’ comments on an online news forum (The Post newspaper), this paper describes patterns of belonging to the historical (colonial) linguistic in-group anglophone and out-group francophone in Cameroon. These groups emerged from the British-French colonisation of the country after WW1, with anglophones representing the former British colony and francophones the French. My focus is on the use of eight plural pronouns and how they index in-group or out-group belonging. Four of the pronouns, we, our, us and ourselves are used inclusively to create a solid anglophone in-group through the narration of a common (colonial) history, linguistic background (the use of English) and experiences. The other four, they, them, their and themselves refer predominantly to francophones as an out-group that must be differentiated from the close-knit anglophone in-group. I illustrate how, in defending the boundaries of these groups, the commentators autobiographically narrate the life trajectories of their in-group, highlight its values and interrogate the moral stance of the out-group. They benefit from the digital space which provides anonymity and closes the geographical distances between them. Overall, the anglophone in-group narrative emerges as an autobiographical narrative within the bigger (national) autobiographical narrative of the country, into which it often opens and is sometimes integrated.

We present the first large-coverage finite-state open-source morphology for Latin (called LatMor) which parses as well as generates vowel quantity information. LatMor is based on the Berlin Latin Lexicon comprising about 70,000 lemmata of classical Latin compiled by the group of Dietmar Najock in theirwork on concordances of Latin authors (see Rapsch and Najock, 1991) which was recently updated by us. Compared to the well-known Morpheus system of Crane (1991, 1998), which is written in the C programming language, based on 50,000 lemmata of Lewis and Short (1907), not well documented and therefore not easily extended, our new morphology has a larger vocabulary, is about 60 to 1200 times faster and is built in the form of finite-state transducers which can analyze as well as generate wordforms and represent the state-of-the-art implementation method in computational morphology. The current coverage of LatMor is evaluated against Morpheus and other existing systems (some of which are not openly accessible), and is shown to rank first among all systems together with the Pisa LEMLAT morphology (not yet openly accessible). Recall has been analyzed taking the Latin Dependency Treebank¹ as gold data and the remaining defect classes have been identified. LatMor is available under an open source licence to allow its wide usage by all interested parties.

In this article we report the results for five POS taggers, i.e., the Mate tagger, the Hunpos tagger, RFTagger, theOpenNLP tagger, andNLTKUnigramtagger, tested on the data of the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank. This is done in order to find the most efficient POS tagger to use for pre-annotation of new treebank data. A corrected 1-run 10-fold cross validation t test shows that the Mate tagger outperforms all the other taggers, with an accuracy score of 88%.

This article describes a method to analyze characters in a literary text by considering their verbal interactions. This method exploits techniques from computational linguistics to extract all direct speech from a treebank, and to build a conversational network that visualizes the speakers, the listeners and their degree of interaction. We apply this method to create and visualize a conversational network for the Chinese Buddhist Canon. We analyze the protagonists and their interlocutors, and report statistics on their number of utterances and types of listeners, how their speech was reported, and subcommunities in the network.

We are investigating methods by which data from dependency syntax treebanks of ancient Greek can be applied to questions of authorship in ancient Greek historiography. From the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank were constructed syntax words (sWords) by tracing the shortest path from each leaf node to the root for each sentence tree. This paper presents the results of a preliminary test of the usefulness of the sWord as a stylometric discriminator. The sWord data was subjected to clustering analysis. The resultant groupings were in accord with traditional classifications. The use of sWords also allows a more fine-grained heuristic exploration of difficult questions of text reuse. A comparison of relative frequencies of sWords in the directly transmitted Polybius book 1 and the excerpted books 9–10 indicate that the measurements of the two texts are generally very close, but when frequencies do vary, the differences are surprisingly large. These differences reveal that a certain syntactic simplification is a salient characteristic of Polybius’ excerptor, who leaves conspicuous syntactic indicators of his modifications.

This paper comparatively explores Atticism as it first appeared in fifth-century Greek oratory and was later revived by Imperial Greek authors. Using Dionysius’ of Halicarnassus and his appreciations of oratory and orators as a frame of reference and then expanding his inferences on works of Imperial era, I attempt to parameterize Atticism as a phenomenon. Ultimately this study will apprise us of the usage of Atticism in Imperial Roman oratory as well, as it then becomes obvious that Atticism has transcended the boundaries of language and has transformed into a constructional rhetorical system. This paper employs a unified node-based metric formulation for implementing various syntactical construction metrics, indicative of the syntactical attributes of the sentences. The developed metrics were applied to annotated texts of six authors, which were then comparatively examined using Principal Component Analysis.