Yabancı Dil Öğretiminde Teknoloji Tabanlı Etkileşim: Second Life Örneği

Author(s): Semin Kazazoğlu / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 164/2014

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.

Klára Osolsobě: Morfologie českého slovesa a tvoření deverbativ jako problém strojové analýzy češtiny

Author(s): Karel Pala / Language(s): Czech Issue: 5/2012

Debating Evil: Using Word Embeddings to Analyse Parliamentary Debates on War Criminals in the Netherlands

Author(s): Milan M. Van Lange,Ralf D. Futselaar / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2019

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.

O języku w serwisie internetowym Ministerstwa Środowiska

Author(s): Rafał Sidorowicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 12/2018

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.

Texts of corpus of Russian dialects of Udmurtia as a source of linguistic and culturological information

Author(s): Ekaterina Anatolyevna Zhdanova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 21/2021

The corpus of Russian dialects of Udmurtia, created on the platform of the linguistic and geographical information system (LGIS) “Dialect” (URL: http://dialect.manuscripts.ru/), contains recordings of oral speech of residents of 166 localities of the Udmurt Republic in the 1970s–1990s. The texts are presented mainly in the form of scanned copies of the pages of notebooks, in which transcription of the conversations of the collectors with the informants is given. There are 9300 scanned copies of pages, all records are certified. The existing markup provides the creation of token samples and visualization of contexts at the user’s request (http://dialect.manuscripts.ru/Lexical/FindQuestPage), which allows us to analyze the features of the lexical composition, as well as some phonetic and grammatical features of the Russian dialects of Udmurtia. Dialect words from texts of the corpus can be mapped in lexical, word building and semantic maps of Russian dialects of Udmurtia. At present, the texts of the corpus are available in the public domain http://manuscripts.ru/dialect-test/notebooks. Recordings of dialect speech can serve as a source of non-linguistic information, namely about historical events and personalities, material and spiritual culture, customs and traditions of the local population, national composition and interethnic relations in Udmurtia of the 20th century. In the paper examples of texts of the corpus in Russian transcription with all lexical, phonetic and grammatical features of dialects, information about speakers, time and places of recordings are given.

A Bilingual Digital Edition of La Belle et la Bête and its Russian Translation by Kh. Demidova

Author(s): Alexei Lavrentiev,Liubov Kurysheva / Language(s): English Issue: 21/2021

This paper presents a digital edition of the manuscript of the first Russian translation of Leprince de Beaumont’s The Beauty and the Beast fairy tale (1756), aligned to its French original. The translation was made in 1758 by a twelve year-old girl, Khionia Demidova (1746-1792), and dedicated to her elder brother. Its original manuscript is conserved at the scientific library of Saratov State University (no. 456). This document is interesting from several points of view: the “naive” translation made by a young girl allows us to understand how the French literature was perceived in the 18th century Russia, what aspects of the French language and socio-cultural phenomena of the Western Europe were difficult to understand, and how the socio-cultural phenomena of the Western Europe were perceived. The peculiarities of Khionia’s spelling and punctuation provide data on her knowledge of Russian grammar and orthography. The digital edition includes a multi-layer transcription of the source document aligned with a digital fac-simile and the original French text. It is published online on the TXM-IHRIM web portal (https://txm-ihrim.huma-num.fr). The workflow of the edition Microsoft Word, Oxgarage and TXM may be reused for similar editions and text corpora.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American Theatre Standard: The low vowels

Author(s): Mateusz Urban / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

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.

Атрибуция в зеркале статистики: анонимные статьи в журналах братьев Достоевских «Время» и «Эпоха»

Author(s): Olga Vladimirovna Zakharova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2021

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.

Code-switching on Facebook among Jordanians

Author(s): Amal AbuTayeh / Language(s): English Issue: 14/2021

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

Сентимент-анализ читательского комментария: автоматизированная vs ручная обработка текста

Author(s): Gulnara Kamilevna Gimaletdinova,Emily Khamzatovna Dovtaeva / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2021

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.

Закон Мензерата – Альтманна: эксперименты с текстами на татарском языке

Author(s): Alfia Makarimovna Galieva / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2021

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.

Metaphorical Models, Cybergenres and User Strategic Modes in Virtual Space

Author(s): Carolina Girón-García,Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2015

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.

Sabiedrības iesaistes akcija “Lasi skaļi”: estētiskie un izglītojošie dzejas ieskaņošanas aspekti

Author(s): Eva Eglāja-Kristsone,Signe Raudive / Language(s): Latvian Issue: 42/2020

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.

Categoria verbale del tempo. Uno studio contrastivo italiano-romeno

Author(s): Ciprian Florentin Popa / Language(s): Italian Issue: 14/2020

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.

Serbian Early Printed Books from Venice: Creating Models for Automatic Text Recognition Using Transkribus

Author(s): Vladimir Polomac / Language(s): English Issue: 22/2022

The paper describes the process of creating a model for the automatic recognition of Serbian Church Slavonic printed books from Venice (from Božidar and Vincenzo Vuković’s printery) by using the Transkribus software platform, based on the principles of artificial intelligence and machine learning. By using the example of Prayer Book (Euchologion) (1538–1540) from Božidar Vuković’s printery, it has been shown that a successful model for the automatic recognition of individual books (with around 5% of unrecognized characters) can also be trained on the material consisting of approximately 4000 words, and that the increased amount of training material (in our case around 38000 words) leads to the improvement of the model and reduced error rate (between 1–2% of unrecognized characters). The most notable result of the paper is manifested through the creation of a generic model for the automatic text recognition of Serbian Church Slavonic books from Božidar and Vincenzo Vuković’s printery. The initial version of the generic model (called Dionisio 1.0. by the Božidar Vuković’s Italian pseudonym – Dionisio della Vecchia) is the first resource for the automatic recognition of the Serbian medieval Cyrillic script, publicly available to all users of the Transkribus software platform (see https://readcoop.eu/model/dionisio-1-0/).

Parkosz’s Treatise from a Typographic Point of View

Author(s): Janusz S. Bień / Language(s): English Issue: 22/2022

The 15th century Latin manuscript containing a treatise by Parkosz was the very first proposal of Polish spelling. To account for all the phonemes of Polish some new letters were proposed, which are not available in the present day fonts. This makes difficult to quote the proposal when discussing the history of Polish spelling. The paper describes the transliteration proposed by the author which used the characters available in the Unicode standard. The ultimate solution is of course creating a specialized font and the paper mentions some aspects of this task.

Wege zur verbesserten automatischen Annotation des mittelbulgarischen Kirchenslawischen

Author(s): Fabio Maion / Language(s): German Issue: 22/2022

The last decade has brought an upswing in research on natural language processing. However, it is well known that historical language stages are largely underrepresented. Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic, a language variety with a significant literary productivity, is a prime example. In the current paper, it is shown how annotated texts of related language varieties can be used to annotate texts written in Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic, such as the 14th-century translation of the Dioptra. In particular, I present a way of adapting the available training data and of reducing the differences between training and test data, thereby improving the result of the automatic morphological annotation. Moreover, it is demonstrated that a comparison with the original work, written in Byzantine Greek, can further increase the results of the annotation by carefully disambiguating homonymous word forms. The presented results can benefit research on Middle Bulgarian Church Slavonic as it shows how texts in this variety can be annotated without authentic training data. The proposed method may be of use not only for Slavonic Studies, however. The method of using training data from genetically related language varieties in combination with translations may be used to annotate other underrepresented language varieties as well.

Erziehung zur Mehrsprachigkeit am Beispiel der Erfahrungen von Germanistik-Studierenden ukrainischer Herkunft

Author(s): Louise van Wijgerden / Language(s): German Issue: 31/2022

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.

A2–C1-TASEME EKSAMITEKSTIDE KÄÄNDSÕNAKASUTUS

Author(s): Kais Allkivi-Metsoja / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 18/2022

In this study, natural language processing (NLP) is used to analyse nominal inflection in Estonian proficiency examination writings representing the CEFR levels A2–C1. The aim is to define the nominal features that distinguish learner language production at each proficiency level. For this purpose, the frequency and variation of inflectional forms are measured in two ways: a) for the nominal parts of speech (PoSs) in total, i.e., considering the use of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and numerals; b) for nouns, pronouns and adjectives individually (numerals were discarded due to low frequency). The analysed corpus contains 480 texts, 120 for each level. Nominal features based on the grammatical categories of number, case and degree of comparison are extracted from the morphologically tagged and manually corrected output of the Stanza NLP toolkit. Relevant features are selected according to the following criteria: they correlate with the proficiency level, their values change monotonically, and there are statistically significant differences between (some) adjacent levels. A2–C1-level texts are consistently distinguished by the number of cases used in the text as well as the ratio of singular and plural forms. The changes in the frequency of nominal inflectional forms mainly occur from level B1 to C1. The use of translative, nominative and genitive case are more strongly related to the text level, while partitive, inessive, elative and comitative case and comparative adjectives also differentiate some levels. Furthermore, the study indicates that it is beneficial to observe inflection-based features separately for each PoS when analysing L2 development. Firstly, the PoSspecific frequencies of some grammatical categories increase at different stages of proficiency. Secondly, changes may emerge for certain PoSs only. The identified criterial features could be used for automated assessment of Estonian L2 writings alongside lexical, syntactic and other linguistic features. The results can also help to specify the CEFR level descriptions for Estonian.

EESTI KEELE ÜHENDKORPUSTE SARI 2013–2021: MAHUKAIM EESTIKEELSETE DIGITEKSTIDE KOGU

Author(s): Kristina Koppel,Jelena Kallas / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 18/2022

The paper describes the Estonian National Corpus 2021 (Estonian NC 2021), the latest and the largest edition in the Estonian National Corpora series. The entire series of Estonian NC consists of four corpora: Estonian NC 2013, 2017, 2019 and 2021. The series was compiled by the Institute of the Estonian Language in cooperation with the software company Lexical Computing Ltd. All corpora are accessible through the Sketch Engine interface, a corpus query system developed and maintained by Lexical Computing Ltd. The data are also stored in the repository Entu at Center of Estonian Language Resources. The Estonian National Corpus 2021 contains eleven sub-corpora (i.e. Web 2013, Web 2017, Web 2019, Web 2021, Feeds 2014-2021, Wikipedia 2021, Wikipedia Talk 2017, the Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Literature, the Balanced Corpus, and the Reference Corpus) totalling 2.4 billion words. In addition, the corpus is divided into genres and topics. The most extensive part of the Estonian NC 2021 is the Estonian Web Corpora, i.e. texts crawled from the web. In the paper, we outline the process of crawling the web, the process of cleaning and post-processing the crawled data, and the methodology for classifying web texts into genres and topics. We also introduce new tools for the analysis of corpus data in Sketch Engine, and suggest further perspectives and needs for corpus development.