"La Langue de Bois" et "Le Politiquement Correct" dans le Discours Public Roumain

Author(s): Sorina Şerbănescu / Language(s): French / Issue: 16/2017

Le discours public roumain d’après la Révolution de '89 a gardé des anciennes habitudes langagières communistes dont "la langue de bois". D’autre côté, il a emprunté, comme une conséquence de la synchronisation trop rapide à la modernité, des clichés langagiers qui continuent les tendances agressives et autoritaires héritées du totalitarisme communiste. Notre analyse imbrique la sémantique du discours, la sémiotique, la pragmatique linguistique et la psycholinguistique, se concentrant sur des corpus tirés des discours publics des dernières dix années.

(Religious) belief and atheism from a semiotic viewpoint

Author(s): Peet Lepik / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2015

The article attempts to give a semiotic definition of the intellectual attributes of belief (in its broader sense), religious belief and atheism, treating all three of them as sign systems – cultural languages.To define the formal structure of the phenomenon of religion, five aspects of the corresponding communicative act should be considered – the orientational, the sign-creating, the cognitive, the teleological and the energetic ones. Belief as an orientational act cannot be treated without including autocommunication: the I-you relation is accompanied by the I-I relation in the form of vertical and horizontal topological imaginations. The sign creating aspect of belief is expressed, on the one hand, in the performative characteristics of utterances (utterance = act) and, on the other hand, in symbolic mnemonic programming. As a cognitive act, communication typical of belief is mythological, expressing identifi cation with the addressee and the subjective eternity of the relation. Teleologically, belief is connected with the existential projection; energetically we treat belief as energeia – the creative force of man. Relying on the Scriptures and theological literature (mainly the works of Paul Tillich), the article analyses the appearance of all these communicative characteristics in religious sign-creating.

A Comparative Macrostructural Analysis of Narrative Discourse in Children with Typical Language Development and Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Author(s): Jelena Kuvač Kraljević,Gordana Hržica,Ivana Vdović Gorup / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2020

The aim of this study is to compare the narrative ability of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with typical language development (TLD) using new material for narrative assessment – the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Twenty children with DLD and twenty with TLD, mean age 6.6 years, all monolingual speakers of Croatian, participated in the study. Results demonstrated that children with TLD outperform children with DLD at the macrostructure level in both conditions – story generation and retelling. In addition, the type of elicitation was shown to have an impact on narrative production.

A magyar szem, illetve a szerb oko lexéma összevető szóasszociációs vizsgálata

Author(s): Edit Andrić / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 4/2015

Lexical associations contribute to understanding associations between words in the mental lexicon. By analysing a single lexeme, the present paper aims at revealing the workings of one segment of the mental lexicon in Hungarian and Serbian. It is often claimed that the more common features a lexeme has with its equivalent in another language, the more likely it is that the two will trigger the same reaction. This is shown using a concrete concept as an example: the organ of vision, more precisely the Hungarian lexeme denoting it and its Serbian equivalent. Since the analysis is based on contrasting lexemes of two genealogically and typologicaly different languages, the initial hypothesis is that the differences between the two languages will also be reflected in the associative meaning fields of the lexemes contrasted. The analysis is based on associative dictionaries of the two languages, namely the Encyclopedia of Hungarian Norms of Associations and the Associative dictionary of Serbian.

A NEUROLINGUISTICS EXPERIMENT BASED ON A NOVEL PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT TOOL

Author(s): Adelina Mirzea,Dumitru Grigore,Nicolae Goga,Ionel Petrescu,Alexandru-Filip Popovici,Ramona Dragomir,Marinel Cornelius DINU / Language(s): English / Issue: 02/2020

The science of neurolinguistics represents the study of brain activity as related to the control, acquisition and production of language. Neurolinguistics looks to the mechanism through which the brain processes language concepts. It is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of linguistics, neuropsychology, communication, computer science, a theory of languages. It is taught in the field of learning foreign languages but it is of interest in other educational disciplines such as psychology, computer science, etc. as well. Neurolinguistics is based both on experimental methods and theoretical models. In this paper we present a novel neurolinguistics experiment done with psychological iOT tool, namely MindMiTM System, that is described in a patent. MindMiTM System is based on the biopotentials measurements (response and levels of skin potentials) taken from the hand's fingers with the help of a finger scanner (for both hands) with monopolar electrodes. All the data needed for a psychological measurement is collected in approximately five minutes. Based on the gathered data, the psychological profile is computed through an innovative method. The system was calibrated on 5000 subjects. The method is based on relevant variables related to personality traits such as for example the level of cortical arousal, the lability and amplitude of electro-dermal response, etc. The algorithm based on those key variables computes a kernel of psychological indicators that reflect cognitive, emotional and social abilities. For the first time in the reported literature, we used the MindMiTM System for a neurolinguistics experiment. The experiment is based on interpreters translating the same text in Romanian, English and German. We present the core technology of the system and the results obtained. The system itself can be used also in educational settings by students in psychology, linguistics computer science, etc.

A protocol for psych verbs

Author(s): Giuliana Giusti,Rossela Iovino / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

So-called psychological verbs such as Italian temere ‘fear’, preoccupare ‘worry’, and piacere ‘like’ present an extremely varied argument structure across languages, that arranges these two roles in apparently opposite hierarchies and assigns them different grammatical functions (subject, direct, indirect and prepositional objects). This paper wants to provide a descriptively adequate classification of such verbs in Latin and Italian to serve future analyses irrespective of their theoretical persuasion. We individuate six classes in Italian and seven classes in Latin, which comply with Belletti and Rizzi’s (1988) original analysis of psych verbs and focus on the three less studied classes, namely unaccusatives, unergatives and impersonals. We show that diachronic variation and apparent intra-language idiosyncrasies are due to the fact that these classes are universally available to all psych roots. The presentation is set in a protocol fashion in the sense of Giusti and Zegrean (2015) and Di Caro and Giusti (2015).

A Unitary Account of Conceptual Representations of Animate/Inanimate Categories

Author(s): Vanja Ković,Kim Plunkett,Gert Westermann / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2010

In this paper we present an ERP study examining the underlying nature of semantic representation of animate and inanimate objects. Time-locking ERP signatures to the onset of auditory stimuli we found topological similarities in animate and inanimate object processing. Moreover, we found no difference between animates and inanimates in the N400 amplitude, when mapping more specific to more general representation (visual to auditory stimuli). These studies provide further evidence for the theory of unitary semantic organization, but no support for the feature-based prediction of segregated conceptual organization. Further comparisons of animate vs. inanimate matches and within– vs. between-category mismatches revealed following results: processing of animate matches elicited more positivity than processing of inanimates within the N400 time-window; also, inanimate mismatches elicited a stronger N400 than did animate mismatches. Based on these findings we argue that one of the possible explanations for finding different and sometimes contradictory results in the literature regarding processing and representations of animates and inanimates in the brain could lie in the variability of selected items within each of the categories, that is, homogeneity of the categories.

Acquiring Epistemic Modal Auxiliaries: The Role of Theory of Mind

Author(s): Hannah N. M. De Mulder,Annette Gautero-Watzema / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2018

This study considers the acquisition of epistemic modal auxiliaries (EMA) in typically developing (TD) and autistic children and the role that Theory of Mind (ToM) plays in this development. Nineteen Dutch-speaking TD children and ten autistic children received tasks assessing ToM, general linguistic ability and EMA comprehension. Results suggest that both groups have some understanding of the Dutch EMA system, but no significant differences were found between groups. However, once participants were divided into ToM passers and ToM failers irrespective of clinical diagnosis, results showed that passers performed significantly better than failers on EMA understanding. Having a good understanding of others’ mental states, as evidenced by full marks on ToM tasks, thus seems important in the acquisition of EMA.

Adaptation Effects in Lexical Processing

Author(s): Christina L. Gagné,Thomas L. Spalding / Language(s): English / Issue: 78/2014

Psycholinguistic research generally adopts a scientific strategy that assumes a relatively stable set of representations and processes. In accordance with this strategy, researchers average measurements across trials, in an attempt to get a statistically stable estimate of performance for a given experimental condition. In this paper, we present four sets of example data drawn from various psycholinguistic tasks and show that the psycholinguistic system appears to adapt across the trials of the experiments. We show that there are cases in which a factor has no main effect, but interacts across trial; in other cases there is a main effect of a factor, but that factor also interacts with trial. Finally, we show that there are some cases in which the way that a factor interacts across trials is dependent on other, unrelated conditions included in the experiment. Our discussion focuses on both theoretical and methodological implications of the adaptiveness of the psycholinguistic system.

Adult-child Communication in Roma Families

Author(s): Hristo Kyuchukov / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

Affect philosophy meets incongruity:

about transformative potentials in comic laughter

Author(s): Mark Weeks / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2020

The emergence of philosophical affect theory, sourced substantially in Continental philosophy, has intensified scholarly attention around affective potentials in laughter. However, the relationship between laughter’s affect and the comic remains a complicated one for researchers, with some maintaining that the two should be approached separately (Emmerson 2019, Parvulescu 2010). While there is a credible academic rationale for drawing precise distinctions, the present article takes an integrative approach to laughter and the comic. It analyses, then synthesises, points of convergence between key texts in affect philosophy and certain elements of incongruity-based humour theory. Specifically, the article seeks to demonstrate that some integration can bring insight and clarity to discussion of transformative potentials sometimes attributed to forms of comic laughter, especially within cultural studies and social science following the philosophy of Deleuze. This approach may also usefully complicate the concept of incongruity itself.

Against the Psych Causative Alternation in Polish

Author(s): Bożena Rozwadowska,Anna Bondaruk / Language(s): English / Issue: Special/2019

The paper examines Object Experiencer (henceforth, OE)/Subject Experiencer (henceforth, SE) verb alternations in Polish in order to check whether Polish exhibits the causative/anticausative alternation in the psych domain (psych causative alternation of Alexiadou and Iordăchioaia 2014, henceforth A&I 2014). The focus is on two types of SE reflexive alternants of OE verbs, i.e., (i) SE forms with an obligatory instrumental case-marked DP derived from stative OE roots, and (ii) SE forms with an optional instrumental DP derived from eventive OE roots. It is argued that in both cases the reflexive SE alternants of either stative or eventive OE verbs have an obligatory or optional instrumental DP which acts as a complement and represents a Target/Subject Matter (henceforth, T/SM, cf. Pesetsky 1995), not a Cause. Therefore, the reflexive OE/SE verb alternation cannot be of the causative/anticausative type. Monovalent reflexive SE verbs, lacking an instrumental DP altogether, are unergative (Reinhart 2001), not unaccusative (contra A&I 2014). The overall conclusion reached in the paper is that the psych causative alternation is absent in Polish.

Age and gender differences in evaluating the pedagogical usability of e-learning materials

Author(s): Liubomir Djalev,Stanislav Bogdanov / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2019

The purpose of the study is to examine the pedagogical usability of interactive e-learning materials for foreign language practice. It is based upon two studies of the expected between-group and within-group differences among participants in the educational process. The sample consists of two groups – lecturers and students, a total of 100 participants, each evaluating four materials specifically prepared for this study. Two consecutive repeated measures ANOVA were conducted in which the gender/age, the position of the participants in the educational process, and usability dimensions were the independent variables. Results indicated that all independent variables and their interactions have a significant effects on the evaluations of the pedagogical usability. Women tend to assign higher values than men. Аge groups generally differ in their evaluations, although there is a tendency to give similar ratings for the individual dimensions of pedagogical usability. The 31-40 years age group evaluates the materials higher while the lowest evaluations are given by the groups of 21-30 and 50+ year old participants. Students tend to rate the pedagogical usability systemically higher than the lecturers. Usability dimensions also have a significant effect on evaluations. The most prominent feature of the materials, by a great margin, is their Applicability. The findings corroborate previous research which show age and gender differences in web usability do exist. We conclude that these differences exist as much in pedagogical usability as in technical usability. Further investigations are suggested to explore more deeply the differences in the perceived pedagogical value of e-learning materials as this has implications for instructional designers, teachers and learners alike.

Agnieszka Sieradzka-Mruk, „Radość i nadzieja. Smutek i trwoga” w drodze krzyżowej. Wybrane aspekty ewolucji dyskursu religijnego w XX wieku na przykładzie leksyki dotyczącej uczuć, Kraków 2016

Author(s): Ewa Woźniak / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 03/2017

The review of: Agnieszka Sieradzka-Mruk, „Radość i nadzieja. Smutek i trwoga” w drodze krzyżowej. Wybrane aspekty ewolucji dyskursu religijnego w XX wieku na przykładzie leksyki dotyczącej uczuć, Wydział Polonistyki UJ, Kraków 2016, ss. 258

Algorithms

Author(s): Ajitesh Ghose / Language(s): English / Issue: 10/2012

Is it ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’ that influences human behaviour? Nowadays, most psychologists would probably acknowledge the impact of both nature and nurture when it comes to behavioural outcomes. However, there is still widespread belief in the idea of the environment (nurture) and genes (nature) influencing behaviour via mutually exclusive pathways. Researchers now know that these influences are highly interdependent, and that experience and environment (nurture) can modify genes (nature) in ways, which, in some cases, can also be passed on to subsequent generations.

Allomorphic responses in Serbian pseudo-nouns as a result of analogical learning

Author(s): Petar Milin,Emmanuel Keuleers,Dušica Filipović-Đurđević / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2011

Allomorphy is a phenomenon that occurs in many languages. Several psycholinguistic studies have shown that allomorphy, if present, co-determines cognitive processing. In the present paper we discuss allomorphic variations of Serbian instrumental singular form of pseudo-nouns as emerging from analogical learning. We compare the predictions derived from memory-based language processing models with results from a previous experimental study with adult Serbian native speakers. Results confirm that the production of suffix allomorphs in Serbian instrumental singular masculine nouns can be accounted for by memory-based learning and simple analogical inferences. The present findings are in line with a growing body of research showing that memory-based learning models make relevant predictions about the cognitive processes involved in various linguistic phenomena.

American Identity Enveloped in Words

Author(s): Anna Stwora / Language(s): English / Issue: 13/2017

This article aims at presenting presidential rhetoric in which the myth of the American Dream is employed in order to influence national identity. It provides an overall description of the theme of the American Dream from the standpoint of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, basing on discretionally selected inaugural addresses delivered by four Presidents of the United States, with particular emphasis placed on the process of moulding individual identity through the construction and maintenance of cognitive and thought patterns. The research questions posed are intended to prove that the American Dream may be perceived as an instrument of psycholinguistic manipulation which can be the source of ideological and social pressure.

Americans’ cultural attitudes to group work: Insights from the proverbs

Author(s): Mohammad Tamimy,Rahman Sahragard / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2021

The role of culture, especially the American culture, in group work is relatively understudied because it is often presumed to be no different from the colonialist West, or is alternatively stereotyped as individualistic and competitive. Thus, this paper studies English-language proverbs used in America, as culturally rich symbols, at three levels of discourse, conceptual metaphor, and content to discern what attitude American culture, as represented in the proverbs, has to group work, and what world views and psychosocial factors can inform such attitudes. The findings suggest that American culture is marginally cooperation friendly, with a considerable penchant for individualism and competition. This ambivalence was not simply a proverbial phenomenon, rather a cultural reality because it was observed to be the result of the interplay between heterogeneous conceptual metaphors, representing different world views. Psychosocially, many factors were observed to have molded the American culture’s attitude to group work, noticeably, egoism, distrust, altruism, and socially shared cognition.

An Analysis of 24 Syllogisms with Abstract-Symbolic Content in what Respects their Capacity to Indicate the Ability for the Categorical Syllogistic Reasoning.

Author(s): Lucia E. Faiciuc / Language(s): English / Issue: 15/2017

In the psychometric instruments that measure cognitive aptitudes like general intelligence, logical thinking, or formal reasoning, there are included, sometimes, some few categorical syllogisms, but why those particular syllogisms are selected is not very clear. On the other hand, in the empirical studies in which the theoretical models of the categorical syllogistic reasoning are tested, there are used syllogistic tasks in which tens of categorical syllogisms are included, as many as possible from the total number of 64 possible syllogisms (for the case in which only the two premises of a syllogism are taken into consideration). From pragmatic reasons (for example, administration time of a psychometric instrument), it would be desirable that, from those syllogistic tasks with a high number of categorical syllogisms to be selected for a psychometric purpose a small number of categorical syllogisms that have the highest potential to discriminate between the persons with a high ability for categorical syllogistic reasoning and the ones with a low ability in this respect, providing a more solid empirical base for the choice of the categorical syllogisms included in the cognitive tests. The present research is intended to be a contribution in that direction, an undertaking that, to my knowledge, lacks from the psychological literature. The research was based on the data obtained by me in a yet unpublished series of empirical studies, on a total number of 323 participants, having the same experimental design, through which there were investigated the cognitive processes involved in the syllogistic reasoning. In those studies, a syllogistic task with 24 categorical syllogisms with an abstract symbolic content, with two versions with a different linguistic format was used. In this research, from these 24 categorical syllogisms, there were selected a small number of syllogisms (five) as having the highest discriminative potential, based on the way they were solved by two groups of participants taken out from the entire sample as having the highest, and, respectively, the lowest stable performance at this syllogistic task in its two versions. The majority of the selected syllogisms (three) were invalid ones, with two negative premises. Future studies are needed in order to investigate the measure in which the selected categorical syllogisms have indeed a predictive value for the ability to reason syllogistically, in particular, or even for the formal thinking, or for intelligence, in general.

An Ontology for Identifying Terms and Equivalents in the Domain of the Balance of Payments

Author(s): Stéphane Carsenty / Language(s): English / Issue: 13/2021

Terms are at the centre of terminology work as defined in ISO 1087-2019: identifying them in texts and finding equivalents for them in different languages is pivotal. This can, however, pose a challenge. Proceeding from the classical theory of the term as a linguistic representation of a concept “stable” over time, shared by domain experts, and built by specific differentiation, this paper presents an ontology-based method to identify terms and find equivalents. By representing all concepts of a subject field in a computer-readable form, we obtain an ontology that represents all identified concepts within the domain as well as the observable relationships among them. The method is applied to a portion of the domain of the balance of payments and international investment position. The paper shows how building an ontology using TEDI (ontoTerminology EDItor) can help to identify terms and find equivalents. The approach is semasiological – the work is corpus-based – as well as onomasiological – it relies on inputs by domain experts regarding both the linguistic and the conceptual dimensions