Search results for "Grammar"
showing 10 items of 662 documents
Plagiarists by chance or by choice? Literature and film tell plagiarism
2019
The notion of plagiarism is so controversial and richly stratified that it fascinates scholars from many different disciplines. For the boundary between plagiarism and similar notions is rather hard to be established. Originality is threatened from any direction: consider imitation, copy, theft. Many forgers are around: some start from afar, some others simply seize the opportunity. Then fatally, the threshold between fiction and reality is trespassed: novels’ plots are about plagiarism, and also cinema easily takes that obsession over. There are plenty of stories that concern a literary theft. This set is so large that it justifies a more general question: how plagiarism can be told? This …
Willingness to Communicate in a Foreign Language: Evidence from Those Who Approach and Those Who Avoid L2 Communication
2014
It is still unclear why some learners are willing to communicate in a foreign language while others are disinclined to do so. One of the most promising paths of inquiry in this respect is the study of willingness to communicate (WTC), focusing on the volitional process of initiating, maintaining, and terminating communication. That is the reason why the main purpose of this paper is to investigate the testimonials of Polish students with persistently low or high L2 WTC scores obtained during their 3-year secondary grammar school experience. The qualitative results of the study appear to demonstrate that, independently from the individual’s general predilections towards communication in the …
Discursive organisation of tourist guided tours : contributional theorisation and valorisation of a professional praxis
2016
The discourse produced in a guided tour stems from different communicative modalities which include the visit assisted by a socio-technical device and the visit guided by an education and visitor service officer. These two modalities show common characteristics of a guided tour; they also offer significant differences. These differences allow us to compile a corpus divided according to its modalities of production and the languages: written text by professionals of the tourism sector, in French and in Spanish. Several issues arise such as the genre taxonomy of the discourse linked to the specific field studied, the unit of the text segmentation which has to free itself from the scriptural o…
The Crane Beach Conjecture
2002
A language L over an alphabet A is said to have a neutral letter if there is a letter e/spl isin/A such that inserting or deleting e's from any word in A* does not change its membership (or non-membership) in L. The presence of a neutral letter affects the definability of a language in first-order logic. It was conjectured that it renders all numerical predicates apart from the order predicate useless, i.e., that if a language L with a neutral letter is not definable in first-order logic with linear order then it is not definable in first-order. Logic with any set /spl Nscr/ of numerical predicates. We investigate this conjecture in detail, showing that it fails already for /spl Nscr/={+, *…
Starting from the Origin: the Early Latin preposition de (and its companions)
2015
This paper explores the semantic network of the Early Latin preposition de (“from”) on the basis of an extensive investigation of the electronic corpus of Comedies by Plautus and Cato’s de Agricoltura, which represent a substantial sample of the oldest Latin attestations in an extensive and non-fragmentary form. Our approach is heavily based on Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987; 1991; Luraghi 2003), although we complement it with considerations on the use of prepositions in Latin elaborated in the framework of Functional Grammar (Pinkster 1990; 1991), as well as with arguments proposed in Linguistic Typology (Croft 1991). This approach allows an explicative account of the interconnections a…
System aspects of sharing a virtual reality
1998
We have recently held the second annual "System Aspects of Sharing a Virtual Reality" workshop, in conjunction with CVE '98 (see report in this issue). The single-day format allowed for twelve presentations plus discussion, which are summarized below. The topics addressed were: designing systems to cope with network limitations; managing communication and information; the construction of systems and toolkits; issues of presentation and user interaction; and application development and evaluation.
Does the mastery of center-embedded linguistic structures distinguish humans from nonhuman primates?
2005
In a recentScience article, Fitch and Hauser (2004; hereafter, F&H) claimed to have demonstrated that cotton-top tamarins fail to learn an artificial language produced by a phrase structure grammar (Chomsky, 1957) generating center-embedded sentences, whereas adult humans easily learn such a language. We report an experiment replicating the results of F&H in humans but also showing that subjects learned the language without exploiting in any way the center-embedded structure. When the procedure was modified to make the processing of this structure mandatory, the subjects no longer showed evidence of learning. We propose a simple interpretation for the difference in performance observed in F…
The Politics of Privacy - a Useful Tautology
2020
While communication and media studies tend to define privacy with reference to data security, current processes of datafication and commodification substantially transform ways of how people act in increasingly dense communicative networks. This begs for advancing research on the flow of individual and organizational information considering its relational, contextual and, in consequence, political dimensions. Privacy, understood as the control over the flow of individual or group information in relation to communicative actions of others, frames the articles assembled in this thematic issue. These contributions focus on theoretical challenges of contemporary communication and media privacy …
Structural Knowledge Extraction from Mobility Data
2016
Knowledge extraction has traditionally represented one of the most interesting challenges in AI; in recent years, however, the availability of large collections of data has increased the awareness that “measuring” does not seamlessly translate into “understanding”, and that more data does not entail more knowledge. We propose here a formulation of knowledge extraction in terms of Grammatical Inference (GI), an inductive process able to select the best grammar consistent with the samples. The aim is to let models emerge from data themselves, while inference is turned into a search problem in the space of consistent grammars, induced by samples, given proper generalization operators. We will …
And Now for Something Completely Different: Running Lisp on GPUs
2018
The internal parallelism of compute resources increases permanently, and graphics processing units (GPUs) and other accelerators have been gaining importance in many domains. Researchers from life science, bioinformatics or artificial intelligence, for example, use GPUs to accelerate their computations. However, languages typically used in some of these disciplines often do not benefit from the technical developments because they cannot be executed natively on GPUs. Instead existing programs must be rewritten in other, less dynamic programming languages. On the other hand, the gap in programming features between accelerators and common CPUs shrinks permanently. Since accelerators are becomi…