Book chapter
Narrative Discourse Segmentation in Clinical Linguistics
This chapter deals with segmentation, definition of reference units and annotation of the first corpus of Russian narratives by individuals with brain damage – people with aphasia and right hemisphere damage – and neurologically healthy speakers. We show that such parameters as pause length and intonation contours cannot be used for segmentation of impaired speech. Instead, we use syntactic criteria for identification of the reference, or – as they are called in this paper – elementary discourse units (EDUs). The Russian CliPS (Clinical Pear Stories) corpus contains multi-layer annotation of audio- and video-recordings, performed on micro- and macro-linguistic level, and can be used as a source for qualitative and quantitative research on various aspects of speech in aphasia and right hemisphere damage.
In this article we report some new experiments in the area of words clustering for the Russian language. We introduce a new clustering method that distributes words into classes according to their syntactic relations. We used a large untagged corpus (about 7,2 bln of words) to collect a set of such relations. The corpus was processed using a set of finite state automata that extracts syntactically dependent combinations having explicit structure. These automata were used to process only unambiguous text fragments because of combination of these techniques increases the quality of sampled input data. The modification of group average agglomerative clustering was used to separate words between clusters. The sampled set of clusters was tested using one of the semantic dictionaries of the Russian language. The NMI score calculated in this article is equal to 0.457 and F1-score is 0.607.
These proceedings include papers on subjects from a wide number of areas including theoretical linguistics, translation, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and applied linguistics, focusing on a variety of languages, ranging from familiar Indo-European languages to Mandarin Chinese, Wolof, and Dene Sųɬiné. In order to make the papers available to the wider research community, these proceedings are being published electronically and distributed freely at http://www.meaningtext.net
The present work is dedicated to the role of gestures in overcoming lexical access problems in patients with motor aphasia. The study is based on a corpus of narratives by brain-damaged individuals – «Russian CliPS» (Clinical Pear Stories), the videos from which were annotated in the linguistic annotator «ELAN», with the gestural layout included in the analysis. The results suggest that most often the difficulties with lexical access were related to the search for nouns and verbs, and gestures (deictic and rhythmic gestures, beats) facilitated lexical access in patients.
«Bankruptcy» Concept Within the Legal Linguistics Coordinates: Russian–English–French Approximations
The article addresses the notion of bankruptcy as perceived by speakers of current Russian, English and French languages both lawyers and participants in professional communication from other trades. Semantic structure of the term is identified based on its lexicographic and regulatory definitions.
This paper deals with the Semantics/Pragmatics distinction in a contrastive ethnolinguistic aspect. I argue for the validity of this distinction based on cross-linguistic data. My claim is that the specificity of the so-called language key words [Wierzbicka 1990:15-17] - linguospecific items particularly representative of a given language speakersђ mentality - is due to pragmatic rather than semantic peculiarities. These pragmatic peculiarities distinguish the key words both from their synonyms within the same language and their counterparts in other languages. The languages under discussion are Russian and English, analyzed within a combined frame of Integral Language Description model [Apresjan 1995:8-238] and Wierzbickaђs ethnolinguistic approach.
This paper presents an analysis of forms of address used in reference to an unknown recipient in everyday communication. In describing the operation of the particular treatment as the author relies on the opinion of renowned experts in the field of speech etiquette and culture of Russian language and on their own linguistic observations and data from a survey conducted in the fall of 2010 the capital’s population aged 20-50 years.