Search results for "Semantic"
showing 10 items of 941 documents
I saw this somewhere else: the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database
2017
The present paper describes the Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database, which comprises 210 words (133 polysemous and 77 homographs). Three-hundred and fifteen Spanish university students took part in the study on which SAW is based. First, subjective word meanings and senses were collected by means of a meaning retrieval task. Two judges then assigned participants’ responses to different categories of meaning according to lexicographical and statistical criteria. Results showed that, while there was a relatively high relationship between the number of senses included in the dictionary and those provided by participants (r = .62), regression analyses on lexical decision and naming times rev…
Performability of Actions
2021
AbstractAction theory may be regarded as a theoretical foundation of AI, because it provides in a logically coherent way the principles of performing actions by agents. But, more importantly, action theory offers a formal ontology mainly based on set-theoretic constructs. This ontology isolates various types of actions as structured entities: atomic, sequential, compound, ordered, situational actions etc., and it is a solid and non-removable foundation of any rational activity. The paper is mainly concerned with a bunch of issues centered around the notion of performability of actions. It seems that the problem of performability of actions, though of basic importance for purely practical ap…
TRANSLATING A FAVELA MUSICAL: VINICIUS DE MORAES’ ORFEU DA CONCEIÇÃO IN GERMAN
2022
Zusammenfassung Vinicius de Moraes’ Musiktheaterstück Orfeu da Conceição. Tragédia carioca em três atos (1954) kann sowohl als Klassiker brasilianischer Literatur als auch als Weltliteratur betrachtet werden. Vinicius verknüpft den griechischen Stoff mit afrobrasilianischer Kultur, Musikstücken, die später zu Bossa Nova-Klassiker wurden und inszeniert einen schwarzen Orpheus auf einem Favelahügel in Rio de Janeiro. Das Stück wurde zwar mehrfach verfilmt, aber kaum übersetzt. Der Beitrag möchte ein paar Herausforderungen für die Übersetzung ins Deutsche skizzieren. Vor allem für die Vermittlung afrobrasilianischer Kultur müssen Strategien entwickelt werden. Erstens soll es um das semantische…
A diachronic study of the (negative) additive «anche» in italian
2016
Resum: En italià modern (IM), els mots additius negatius són elements focalitzadors que típicament se sotmeten a la concordança negativa amb una negació oracional o amb un altre element legitimador de la negació. En aquest article investiguem l’evolució diacrònica d’un element additiu negatiu, neanche ‘ni/ni tan sols’. En italià antic (IA, varietat florentina entre 1200 i 1370), no hi ha testimonis de focalitzadors additius negatius morfològicament complexos com neanche. En canvi, l’element corresponent no negatiu additiu, anche, podia combinar-se amb un marcador negatiu o amb algun altre element negatiu: né/non… anche ‘ni/ni tan sols’. Mostrem que en IA (i) el mot additiu no negatiu anche …
Familiarity changes as a function of perceptual shifts.
2010
This experiment compares the yes-no and forced recognition tests as methods of measuring familiarity. Participants faced a phase of 3 study-test recognition trials in which they studied words using all the letters of the alphabet (overlapping condition, O), and an additional phase in which targets and lures did not share any letters (non-overlapping condition, NO). Finally, subjects performed a forced-choice task in which they had to choose one of two new words, each from one of the subsets (Parkin et al., 2001). Results in the NO condition higher than .50, showing their sensitivity to familiarity. When the letter set of the words for study in the third list of the NO condition was swit…
Constructions-and-frames analysis of translations
2013
Translation can generally be seen as a task in which the meaning of the original should be preserved as far as possible. This paper formulates the preservation of meaning in terms of theprimacy of the framehypothesis: ideally, the frame of the original is matched by the frame of the translation. I investigate one factor overriding this principle in translations between English and German through the examination of two grammatical constructions, one in English, one in German, which are not commonly available in the other language. Picking a construction comparable in function in the target language leads to frame shifts. In addition to highlighting the interplay between construction and fram…
Pragmatic markers resulting from language contact. The case of sañani in Aymara
2020
This paper explores the pragmatic functions of a previously unattested pragmatic marker (Fraser, 1996, 2006) found in Aymara, i.e. sanani ‘let’s say’. The uses of sanani suggest that this marker is the result of the influence of Spanish on Aymara due to sustained language contact. Sanani seems to be the “replication” (Heine and Kuteva, 2005) of the Spanish pragmatic marker digamos ‘let’s say’. Like digamos (Grande Alija, 2010; Quartararo, 2017a), sanani functions as a pragmatic marker by signaling either an inferential process or the semantic relation between two discourse segments. The original data used for this analysis was gathered through the Family Problems Picture task (San Roque et …
Hjelmslev et la "fonction sémiotique", du modèle structural au modèle cognitif
2008
The article discusses the concept of semiotics function in Hjelmslev, finding sources of the theory of language’s stratification. The semiotic function, which is in Hjelmslev the principle underlying the dynamic layering, is identified here as both an attraction of two heterogeneous spaces and as a set of operations of sense’s establishment. At historiographic level, this article presents a new hypothesis of interpretation, that the hjelmslevian structuralism has not built a static theory of language, disinterested to the cognitive dimension, but a careful theory to operational aspects of semiosis.
“It is alive!” Evidence for animacy effects in semantic categorization and lexical decision
2019
AbstractAnimacy is one of the basic semantic features of word meaning and influences perceptual and episodic memory processes. However, evidence that this variable also influences lexicosemantic processing is mixed. As animacy is a semantic variable thought to have evolutionary roots, we first examined its influence in a semantic categorization task that did not make the animacy dimension salient, namely, concrete-abstract categorization. Animates were categorized faster (and more accurately) than inanimates. We then assessed the influence of animacy in two lexical decision experiments. In Experiment 2, we mostly used legal nonwords, whereas in Experiment 3, we varied the context of the non…
Hemispheric differences in specificity effects in talker identification
2010
In the visual domain, Marsolek and colleagues (1999, 2008) have found support for two dissociable and parallel neural subsystems underlying object and shape recognition: an abstract-category subsystem that operates more effectively in the left cerebral hemisphere (LH), and a specific-exemplar subsystem that operates more effectively in the right cerebral hemisphere (RH). Evidence of this asymmetry has been observed in priming specificity for linguistic (words, pseudoword forms) and nonlinguistic (objects) stimuli. In the auditory domain, the authors previously found hemispheric asymmetries in priming effects for linguistic (spoken words) and nonlinguistic (environmental sounds) stimuli. In …