Search results for "Semantics"

Frame-Semantics meets Multilingual Legal Terminology. Theoretical Principles Based on a German-French Case Study

2021

International audience; Terminology aims primarily at elaborating standardized notions for the various complex concepts within specialized fields, intending to separate clearly defined technical terms from general lexical units that are used in every-day situations, with yet a wide range of vocabulary, that is specialized to some extent but cannot be delimited by terminological standards, emerging in between (ten Hacken 2010, 2015). For legal experts, for instance, the elaboration of precisely determined legal terms contributes to an overall specific understanding of legal concepts regardless of the possible ambiguities the same term may have in a general setting. At the same time, a variet…

Letter-case information and the identification of brand names.

2014

A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task (‘is it a brand name?’): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the s…

Design, development and validation of a system for automatic help to medical text understanding

2020

Abstract Objective The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, that facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations. Background The comprehension of a medical text is often a difficult task for laypeople because it requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her health-literacy level. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification, either syntactical or lexical. The ones dealing with lexical simplification usually replace the original text and do not provide additi…

'Tell Us Only What You Know': Evidentiality in the Discourse of Participants in Spanish Trials

2019

El objetivo de esta propuesta es explorar el uso de la evidencialidad en los juicios españoles y su relación con las convenciones del género y los roles de los participantes en estos eventos discursivos. Para ello, basamos nuestro estudio en un análisis cuantitativo-cualitativo de un corpus transcrito de ensayos orales en español. La evidencialidad es una categoría semántico-funcional que incluye dispositivos lingüísticos que marcan la fuente de información detrás de las declaraciones del hablante. El marcado explícito de la fuente no es obligatorio en español; sin embargo, en géneros específicos (legal, parlamentario y académico), se convierte en una poderosa herramienta argumentativa para…

Belief reports and pragmatic intrusion: the case of null appositives

2008

Mapping wordnets from the perspective of inter-lingual equivalence

2017

Mapping wordnets from the perspective of inter-lingual equivalence This paper explores inter-lingual equivalence from the perspective of linking two large lexico-semantic databases, namely the Princeton WordNet of English and the plWordnet ( pl. Slowosiec ) of Polish. Wordnets are built as networks of lexico-semantic relations between words and their meanings, and constitute a type of monolingual dictionary cum thesaurus. The development of wordnets for different languages has given rise to many wordnet linking projects (e.g. EuroWordNet, Vossen, 2002). Regardless of a linking method used, these projects require defining rules for establishing equivalence links between wordnet building bloc…

Word-Formation and Contextualism

2014

While there is, under the heading of “morphopragmatics”, some research on the relation of pragmatics and word-formation, especially with a focus on diminutives, the major theoretical models of word-formation do not account for the word-formation/pragmatics interface in any systematic fashion. Moreover, in recent contextualist approaches to the semantics/pragmatics interface, the typical grammatical unit referred to is the sentence (including words that constitute a sentence), but not word structure or the morpheme. Drawing on morphological data from German, I will show the influence of pragmatic processes and principles on word-formation, arguing that word structures are also units that may…

The Attributive/Referential Distinction, Pragmatics, Modularity of Mind and Modularization

2011

In this paper I deal with the attributive/referential distinction. After reviewing the literature on the issue, I adopt Jaszczolt's view based on default semantics. I relate her view to Sperber and Wilson's Principle of Relevance. I argue in favour of the modularity hypothesis in connection with pragmatic interpretations. I also discuss the issue of modularization a la Karmiloff-Smith in connection with default inferences and, in particular, referential readings of NPs. I reply to some considerations by Cummings and use data from referential/attributive uses of NPs to show that the modularity hypothesis is defensible.

Predicting Word Maturity from Frequency and Semantic Diversity: A Computational Study

2016

Semantic word representation changes over different ages of childhood until it reaches its adult form. One method to formally model this change is the word maturity paradigm. This method uses a text sample for each age, including adult age, and transforms the samples into a semantic space by means of Latent Semantic Analysis. The representation of a word at every age is then compared with its adult representation via computational maturity indices. The present study used this paradigm to explore to the impact of word frequency and semantic diversity on maturation indices. To do this, word maturity indices were extracted from a Spanish incremental corpus and validated, using correlation scor…

Les Expressions Figées des Verbes Ser et Estar Suivies de Prép X

1996

The present work is based on the methodological setting of the LADL studies. In order to establish the body subject to analysis, we selected only the fixed phrases N0 ser/estar Prep X. In this way, we have collected 1138 expressions involving estar Prep X, and 534 with ser Prep X. In order to classify these expressions, we have grouped them according to the number and form of their complements. As to the part pertaining to semantics, the alphabetical indices have allowed us to establish that, concerning ser and estar, all the formal schemes exists for both Spanish and french, at least under the form of fixed expressions. As to the part concerning translation, we have attempted to mesure the…