Search results for " Semantic"
showing 10 items of 271 documents
Semantic Models and Translating
1994
Abstract: This paper examines the relevance of three semantic models for translation. Structural semantics, more specifically semantic feature analysis, has given rise to the maxim that we should translate "bundles of semantic features". Prototype semantics suggests that word-meanings have cores and fuzzy edges which are influenced by culture. For translation this means that we do not necessarily translate bundles of features but have to decide whether to focus on the core or the fuzzy edges of the meaning of a particular word. Scenes-and-frames semantics suggests that word meaning is influenced by context and the situation we are in. Word-meaning is thus not static but dynamic, and it is t…
Crossing Modalities: A Cognitive Semantics Perspective on Quoting
2015
Elaborating on Talmy (2007a, forthcoming) and Lampert (2013, 2014), this follow- up study probes into quoting as an attention-and modality-sensitive phenomenon at the interface of speech and writing, taking inaugural addresses from Kennedy to Obama as cases in point. Lexicalized to redirect some attention from a quotation’s referential content to concomitants closely associated with it, quotatives medium-specifically prime speech-internal properties of their targets, animating the ‘other voice’ through prosodic and gestural prompts in face-to-face interactions, while figural prompts demarcate verbatim citations in print. Quotations from pre-scripted videotaped presidential inaugurals reveal…
Sense Activation Triggering in English Epistentials: Attention Distribution, Contextual Modulation of Meaning, and Categorization Issues
2015
Drawing on Talmy’s forthcoming The Attention System of Language and elaborating on a series of previous studies, this paper addresses the interrelation of attention distribution, contextual modulation of meaning, and categorization issues in the area of evidentiality and epistemic modality Adopting a corpus-based approach, it will investigate how the default salience levels of evidential and epistemic semantic components in so-called epistentials (linguistic items that syncretistically represent evidential and epistemic components) can be raised, lowered, or even inhibited under the impact of immediately adjacent items that themselves associate evidential or epistemic semantic components (i…
Assimilation of Problematic Experiences in Linguistic Therapy of Evaluation: A Case Study
2008
In this article the process of assimilation in the problematic experience of tiredness of one patient, Maria, is shown. Maria was treated with linguistic therapy of evaluation (LTE), a therapy midway between constructivist and cognitive therapies based on the theory of General Semantics, for 14 sessions. Maria was one of the most successful cases of LTE. Aims of the study were to show the process of assimilation in a case with good outcome and to explore if this process shows an irregular pattern, with setbacks or jumps between stages. This process is analyzed by the Assimilation of Problematic Experiences Scale (APES), an eight-stage scale that shows the process of assimilation from an exp…
Deus ex machina: una frana
2020
Sull'uso odierno della locuzione "deus ex machina": estensioni semantiche
Semantic Word Error Rate for Sentence Similarity
2016
Sentence similarity measures have applications in several tasks, including: Machine Translation, Paraphrase Iden- tification, Speech Recognition, Question-answering and Text Summarization. However, measures designed for these tasks are aimed at assessing equivalence rather than resemblance, partly departing from human cognition of similarity. While this is reasonable for these activities, it hinders the applicability of sentence similarity measures to other tasks. We therefore propose a new sentence similarity measure specifically designed for resemblance evaluation, in order to cover these fields better. Experimental results are discussed.
Lexical and conceptual components of stem completion priming in patients with Alzheimer's disease
1999
This study evaluated the hypothesis of dissociation between normal lexical but deficient conceptual repetition priming in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). For this purpose, we administered to patients with AD and age-matched normal controls the Stem Completion task. In Experiment 1, the level of word processing during study was manipulated by requiring subjects to count vowels (graphemic condition) or generate meanings (semantic condition) of target words. In Experiment 2, the presentation modality was varied during the study to obtain an intramodal and crossmodal repetition priming. Probably due to a floor effect of performance in the graphemic condition, in Experiment 1, AD patient…
Semantic anomaly detection in school-aged children during natural sentence reading : A study of fixation-related brain potentials
2018
In this study, we investigated the effects of context-related semantic anomalies on the fixation-related brain potentials of 12–13-year-old Finnish children in grade 6 during sentence reading. The detection of such anomalies is typically reflected in the N400 event-related potential. We also examined whether the representation invoked by the sentence context extends to the orthographic representation level by replacing the final words of the sentence with an anomalous word neighbour of a plausible word. The eye-movement results show that the anomalous word neighbours of plausible words cause similar first-fixation and gaze duration reactions, as do other anomalous words. Similarly, we obser…
Embedded word priming elicits enhanced fMRI responses in the visual word form area.
2018
Lexical embedding is common in all languages and elicits mutual orthographic interference between an embedded word and its carrier. The neural basis of such interference remains unknown. We employed a novel fMRI prime-target embedded word paradigm to test for involvement of a visual word form area (VWFA) in left ventral occipitotemporal cortex in co-activation of embedded words and their carriers. Based on the results of related fMRI studies we predicted either enhancement or suppression of fMRI responses to embedded words initially viewed as primes, and repeated in the context of target carrier words. Our results clearly showed enhancement of fMRI responses in the VWFA to embedded-carrier …
Contextual diversity facilitates learning new words in the classroom.
2017
Published: June 6, 2017 In the field of word recognition and reading, it is commonly assumed that frequently repeated words create more accessible memory traces than infrequently repeated words, thus capturing the word-frequency effect. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that a seemingly related factor, contextual diversity (defined as the number of different contexts [e.g., films] in which a word appears), is a better predictor than word-frequency in word recognition and sentence reading experiments. Recent research has shown that contextual diversity plays an important role when learning new words in a laboratory setting with adult readers. In the current experiment, we directly mani…