The Main Lexical Features of the Newspaper-Journalistic Style in Modern Chinese Media Texts

Functional language styles serve social, political, economic, cultural, and other areas of human life, they are also widely used in our studies and life. The Chinese languages journalistic style has its unique linguistic features that give us a basis for a better understanding of Chinese media texts. The research is carried out due to the necessity to identify the specifics and distinguishing features of the stylistic system of the Chinese language, in particular, the journalistic style, which is a kind of literary written Chinese language and is widely used in almost all mass media. The results introduce new data into the process of learning the functional styles of the Chinese language, and will also contribute to a better understanding of the structure, culture of the language, and content of Chinese media texts in terms of their lexical content.

Expansion by migration and diffusion by contact is a source to the global diversity of linguistic nominal categorization systems

Languages of diverse structures and different families tend to share common patterns if they are spoken in geographic proximity. This convergence is often explained by horizontal diffusibility, which is typically ascribed to language contact. In such a scenario, speakers of two or more languages interact and influence each other’s languages, and in this interaction, more grammaticalized features tend to be more resistant to diffusion compared to features of more lexical content. An alternative explanation is vertical heritability: languages in proximity often share genealogical descent. Here, we suggest that the geographic distribution of features globally can be explained by two major pathways, which are generally not distinguished within quantitative typological models: feature diffusion and language expansion. The first pathway corresponds to the contact scenario described above, while the second occurs when speakers of genetically related languages migrate. We take the worldwide distribution of nominal classification systems (grammatical gender, noun class, and classifier) as a case study to show that more grammaticalized systems, such as gender, and less grammaticalized systems, such as classifiers, are almost equally widespread, but the former spread more by language expansion historically, whereas the latter spread more by feature diffusion. Our results indicate that quantitative models measuring the areal diffusibility and stability of linguistic features are likely to be affected by language expansion that occurs by historical coincidence. We anticipate that our findings will support studies of language diversity in a more sophisticated way, with relevance to other parts of language, such as phonology.

On derivatives

The question of derivates has been repeatedly raised in the teaching processes of language grammar and general linguistics. This circumstance became the basis for creating this short article. It is well known that a word-form can be changeable or unchangeable, and this fact is determined by the parts of speech. Form-changing words can undergo two types of change: inflectional and derivative. During the inflectional change, the form of the word changes, but the lexical and semantic aspects of the word do not change, i.e. its semantic and content data do not change. A classic example of this type of change is flexion of nouns.Derivation is the formation of a word from another word by the addition of non-inflectional affixes. Derivation can be of two types. The first is lexical derivation, in which the derivative affix produces a word with a different lexical content. A word-form can be another part of speech or the same part of speech but with a different lexical content. The second type of derivation is, first of all, grammatical derivation, when grammatical categories are produced. The grammatical category in general (and a word-form in general as well) includes the unity of morphological and semantical aspects. There is no separate semantics without morphology. Any semantic category and/or content must be conveyed in a specific form, so only a specific form has a specific morphosemantics, which can be produced by the grammatical derivatives. The main difference between the two types of derivation mentioned above (and therefore between the two types of derivatives) is the levels of the language hierarchy. The first type of affixes works at the lexical level of the language, while the second type derivatives produce forms at the morphological and semantic levels. The second type derivatives are inter-level affixes, because they act on two hierarchical levels. Any grammatical category includes specific morphosemantic oppositional forms. Thus, unlike inflectional affixes, the rest of the morphological affixes are all other types of inter-level derivatives. It should be noted that the preverb in Kartvelian languages ​​is the only linguistic unit with all possible functions of affix. DOWNLOADS

The effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>

The effect of lexical content on sentence production in nonfluent aphasia

<p>Individuals with nonfluent aphasia are able to produce many words in isolation, but have great difficulty producing sentences. Most research to date has compared accuracy across different types of sentence structures, focussing on grammatical aspects that may be compromised in nonfluent aphasia. However, based on the premise that lexical elements activate their associated grammatical frames as well as vice versa, lexical content may also be of vital importance. For example, rapid access to lexical elements – particularly ones appearing early in the sentence - may be crucial, especially if the sentence plan is weakly activated or rapidly decaying. The current study investigated the effect of different aspects of lexical content on nonfluent aphasic sentence production. Five participants with nonfluent aphasia, four participants with fluent aphasia and eight controls completed two picture description tasks eliciting subject-verb-object sentences (e.g., the dog is chasing the fox). Based on existing evidence suggesting that common words are accessed more rapidly than rarer ones, Experiment 1 manipulated the frequency of sentence nouns, thereby varying their speed of lexical retrieval by varying the frequency of sentence nouns. Nonfluent participants' accuracy was consistently higher for sentences commencing with a high frequency subject noun, even when errors on those nouns were themselves excluded. This was not the case for the fluent participants. Experiment 2 manipulated the semantic relationship between subject and object nouns. Previous research suggests that phrases containing related words may be challenging for individuals with nonfluent aphasia, possibly because lexical representations are inadequately tied to appropriate structural representations. The nonfluent participants produced sentences less accurately when they contained related lexical items, even when those items were in different noun phrases. The fluent participants exhibited the opposite trend. Finally, the relationship between the patterns observed in Experiment 1 and 2 and lesion location in the aphasic participants was explored by analysing magnetic resonance scans. We discuss the implications of our findings for theoretical accounts of sentence production more generally, and of nonfluent aphasia in particular. More precisely, we propose that individuals with nonfluent aphasia are disproportionately reliant on activated lexical representations to drive the sentence generation process, an idea we call the Content Drives Structure (COST) hypothesis.</p>

Relationships at school: social representations of supervisors and teachers

This study discusses the relations of belonging at school between supervisors and teachers, aiming to analyze in which relational group these authors belong more strongly. The Theory of Social Representations guided the research, in view of its construction processes, anchoring and objectification, to be closely linked to belonging, making the strange, familiar. Data collection was carried out through semi-structured and in-depth interviews distributed by: Classification by Elements of Meaning, Lexical Content Analysis and Thematic Analysis. The results point out, among other factors, that the construction of representations by social groups makes the stranger known to the subjects, pointing to belonging to the group of people or to the place, in addition, belonging is in the self and the other's recognition as part of the same group, not only based on affection, but on partnership, sharing and exchange of professional knowledge.

Incremental Composition in Distributional Semantics

Despite the incremental nature of Dynamic Syntax (DS), the semantic grounding of it remains that of predicate logic, itself grounded in set theory, so is poorly suited to expressing the rampantly context-relative nature of word meaning, and related phenomena such as incremental judgements of similarity needed for the modelling of disambiguation. Here, we show how DS can be assigned a compositional distributional semantics which enables such judgements and makes it possible to incrementally disambiguate language constructs using vector space semantics. Building on a proposal in our previous work, we implement and evaluate our model on real data, showing that it outperforms a commonly used additive baseline. In conclusion, we argue that these results set the ground for an account of the non-determinism of lexical content, in which the nature of word meaning is its dependence on surrounding context for its construal.

Vocalizations in dance classes teach body knowledge

Language is believed to be a central device for communicating meaning and knowledge between humans. It is superb in its capacity to code abstract ideas and displaced information, which can be conveyed from person to person, sometimes across centuries. When it comes to instructing a bodily skill in co-present situations, language is used along with other multimodal resources. This paper focuses on the role of vocalizations in dance teaching, syllables that express simultaneous body movement rather than abstract lexical content. While being essentially a vocal resource, the meaning of vocalizations arises in the simultaneously moving bodies. By carrying indexical and only partially conventionalized meaning, vocalizations constitute a puzzle for linguistic theory that preferably targets the arbitrary, symbolic and conventionalized aspects of human vocal production. The meanings conveyed from one body to another through a vocalization are experiential rather than intellectual. Vocalizations provide a solution to the problem of transferring body knowledge from one autonomous organism to another, and can even be embedded in syntax. The analysis is based on an occasion of teaching a jazz routine to a larger group of students.

The influence of modern marketing techniques on the stylistic and grammar representation of business and advertising utterances in English and their translation into Ukrainian

This study examines how modern marketing technologies affect the lexical and syntactic presentation of the business and advertising utterances that are client-oriented and their translation into Ukrainian. In particular, it describes how such psychological concept as "You-attidude" determinates the lexical, grammatical and syntactic structure of statements used in the business style of communication. The analysis of speech structures, which function in various English-language messages of advertising, business sphere and business correspondence, are analysed from the point of view of their lexical content, syntactic structure and style,the translation of these statements into Ukrainian has been presented.