Book
Frequency effects in language representation
We present an empirical study to address two theoretical issues, both of which are controversial in the scholarly literature, namely the “Locative Alternation” and Russian aspectual “empty” prefixes. Our data, extracted from the Russian National Corpus, represent the behavior of the Russian verb gruzit’ ‘load’, which participates in the Locative Alternation in both its unprefixed (gruzit’) and prefixed forms (nagruzit’, zagruzit’ and pogruzit’), where the prefixes na-, za- and po- are traditionally considered semantically “empty”, bearing only the aspectual feature “perfective”. The data on the Locative Alternation was analyzed using a logistic regression model in order to probe for a significant relationship between prefixes and grammatical constructions. While the unprefixed imperfective gruzit’ favors the Theme-Object construction, the addition of a prefix radically changes this distribution, each in a different way: nagruzit’ strongly favors the Goal-Object construction, zagruzit’ creates a near-balance between the two constructions, whereas pogruzit’ uses the Theme-Object construction in a nearly exclusive manner. Our findings support the hypothesis that the Locative Alternation involves both the meaning of the verb and the meaning of its constructions. Since the three prefixed verbs exhibit statistically significant differences in their behavior, our data does not support the idea that the prefixes are semantically empty. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that a verb is not a monolithic unit, since passive participles behave differently from other verb forms. The Locative Alternation constructions can be represented by their full and reduced versions, which show a different distribution of the two constructions. In addition, we find an interesting relationship between the prefixes and the use of prepositions.
The article discusses the most recent trends in the development of the English progressive. A corpus-based approach to linguistic research is seen as an effective means of determining reliability of the data retrieved and helps track the major diachronic dynamic in the increasing frequency of the progressive aspect that has taken place since the beginning of the 20th century. The article specifically deals with the extension of the progressive to new constructions, such as modal, present perfect and past perfect passive progressive, and also accounts for the use of progressive forms in the contextual environment not generally characteristic of them.
This paper is devoted to the use of two tools for creating morphologically annotated linguistic corpora: UniParser and the EANC platform. The EANC platform is the database and search framework originally developed for the Eastern Armenian National Corpus (www.eanc.net) and later adopted for other languages. UniParser is an automated morphological analysis tool developed specifically for creating corpora of languages with relatively small numbers of native speakers for which the development of parsers from scratch is not feasible. It has been designed for use with the EANC platform and generates XML output in the EANC format.
UniParser and the EANC platform have already been used for the creation of the corpora of several languages: Albanian, Kalmyk, Lezgian, Ossetic, of which the Ossetic corpus is the largest (5 million tokens, 10 million planned for 2013), and are currently being employed in construction of the corpora of Buryat and Modern Greek languages. This paper will describe the general architecture of the EANC platform and UniParser, providing the Ossetic corpus as an example of the advantages and disadvantages of the described approach.
Four electronic corpora created in 2011 within the framework of the “Corpus Linguistics: the Albanian, Kalmyk, Lezgian, and Ossetic Languages” Program of Fundamental Research of the RAS are presented. The interface and functionalities of these corpora are described, engineering problems to be solved in their creation are elucidated, and the promises of their development are discussed. A particular emphasis is made on the compilation of dictionaries and automatic grammatical markup of the corpora.
Cognitive Linguistics offers an enticing possibility to approach time-honored linguistic problems from a new standpoint and view them in a new dimension. Proving this theory, all contributions in this volume are Slavic-oriented and thoroughly grounded in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The volume is composed of three thematic sections – grammar, semantics and discourse analysis with applied linguistics – representing fields of interest and simultaneously corresponding to levels of linguistic organization. The book offers studies on completability as an important parameter in the description of the Russian aspect system, application of Langacker’s theory of subjectification to the analysis of Russian perfective, interaction between aspect and modality in Slavic, morphological case architecture in Slovak, Czech dative-marked nominals, Russian instrumental of comparison, affirmation, possessive-locative constructions in Macedonian, lexical semantics, spoken discourse, metaphorical expressions in legal language and lexicography.
The project we present – Russian Learner Translator Corpus (RusLTC) is a multiple learner translator corpus which stores Russian students’ translations out of English and into it. The project is being developed by a cross-functional team of translator trainers and computational linguists in Russia. Translations are collected from several Russian universities; all translations are made as part of routine and exam assignments or as submissions for translation contests by students majoring in translation. As of March 2014 RusLTC contains the total of nearly 1.2 million word tokens, 258 source texts, and 1,795 translations. The paper gives a brief overview of the related research, describes the corpus structure and corpus-building technologies used; it also covers the query tool features and our error annotation solutions. In the final part we make a summary of the RusLTC-based research, its current practical applications and suggest research prospects and possibilities.
This article deals with metaphor studying in the light of cognitive linguistics. Metaphor modeling is used to research into metaphorization in English academic discourse in economics. The research focuses on the comparative analysis of metaphor at different levels of second language proficiency and professional competence.