{"title":"Missing link: code-switches, borrowings, and accommodation biases","authors":"Hendrik De Smet, Marlieke Shaw","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0088","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0088","url":null,"abstract":"When words are transferred from a source language into a target language, they may become conventionalized and appear to fully adopt target-language morphosyntactic behavior. Such words are traditionally regarded as borrowings. Even borrowings, however, are subject to probabilistic usage constraints, which we refer to as “accommodation biases” and which distinguish borrowings from native vocabulary. A case study is presented on accommodation biases in French-based verbs and adjectives in Middle English, showing that accommodation biases are robustly attested and can be diachronically persistent over long periods. In structural terms, accommodation biases resemble some of the familiar morphosyntactic constraints on code-switching. Combining the empirical evidence with theoretical argumentation, it is proposed that accommodation biases reflect a processing cost that is specifically associated with transferred items, and that arises from dual-language activation in bilingual speakers. Thus, accommodation biases indicate that even conventionalized borrowings may be more akin to code-switches than hitherto assumed.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140198851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations","authors":"Borja Herce, Marc Allassonnière-Tang","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0010","url":null,"abstract":"Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found to be closer in meaning. Both of these findings suggest that these structures may have an extramorphological function. Using gradient distributional-semantic similarity offers a way to objectively assess the degree of (un)naturalness of a set of forms and meanings, something which has been lacking from most discussions on the structure of features and the architecture of paradigms.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140201834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alexander Andrason, Onsho Mulugeta, Shimelis Mazengia
{"title":"Conative animal calls in Macha Oromo: function and form","authors":"Alexander Andrason, Onsho Mulugeta, Shimelis Mazengia","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0056","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies the category of conative animal calls (CACs) in a Cushitic variety – Macha Oromo (Ethiopia). The authors analyze the function (pragma-semantics) and form (phonetics and morphology) of 52 CACs collected during fieldwork activities and conclude the following: the category of CACs in Macha Orono largely complies with the prototype of a CAC posited recently in literature. Moreover, Macha Oromo data suggest a few novel generalizations (a close relationship between summonses and onomatopoeias, and between dispersals and motion-inciting/sustaining directionals, as well as a general preference for close I/U vowels) and raise a question regarding the validity of the hierarchy of semantic types of CACs proposed in some studies.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Effects of grammatical gender on gender inferences: Evidence from French hybrid nouns","authors":"Benjamin Storme, Laura Delaloye Saillen","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2022-0064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2022-0064","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of research shows that readers and listeners are biased by the grammatical gender of a noun when making inferences about the gender of its referent. This result is central in debates about gender-fair language but has mostly been established using masculine generics. This paper presents two preregistered studies on French that aim to replicate this result but using a lesser-studied type of noun: generic hybrid nouns. These nouns can refer to both male and female individuals but are either masculine or feminine, depending on the noun (e.g. <jats:italic>un talent</jats:italic> ‘a talent’ and <jats:italic>une vedette</jats:italic> ‘a star’). The availability of both genders for hybrid nouns allows for a more comprehensive test of the effect of grammatical gender than permitted by masculine generics. Overall, the paper replicates the role of grammatical biases in gender inferences, with masculine hybrid nouns being judged as more likely to refer to male individuals as compared to feminine hybrid nouns. However the results did not reveal a symmetric bias for feminine nouns, which were interpreted as gender-neutral. But this latter result should be interpreted with caution as it could be due to uncontrolled effects of gender stereotypes coming from the specific stimuli used in the study.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cognitive mechanisms driving (contact-induced) language change: introduction to the special issue","authors":"Michael Percillier, Yela Schauwecker","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0164","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented to investigate language change, and how language change can be theoretically modeled in terms of cognitive mechanisms. In this introductory article, we first outline our aims by describing the call for papers and the workshop which laid the foundation for this special issue. We then provide a state of the art on the integration of research on cognitive mechanisms and language change before introducing the contributions and listing which of the central questions they address.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"120 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bilingualism-induced language change: what can change, when, and why?","authors":"John A. Hawkins, Luna Filipović","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0089","url":null,"abstract":"Contact between languages has become increasingly recognized as a major source of historical change, as linguistic properties are introduced from one language into another. Yet contact does not necessarily lead to such changes. In fact, arguably most of the properties that contrast between two languages in contact at a given place and time do not change. This paper argues that historical and contact linguistics should now look more systematically at different kinds of bilingualism rather than contact per se and should incorporate recent sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic findings from this literature, since these can help us understand both when change occurs and when it does not. In this context we build on the general model of bilingualism, CASP (short for “complex adaptive system principles”), proposed by Filipović and Hawkins and explore its predictions for whether and when changes will occur in one or the other language of a bilingual. In the event that the relevant speech community comprises monolinguals in addition to bilinguals, these changes may then spread to the wider community when social and demographic circumstances favor this. The paper gives illustrative data supporting CASP’s predictions for change in both language usage and grammar among bilinguals.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140171100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Semantic change and socio-semantic variation: the case of COVID-related neologisms on Reddit","authors":"Quirin Würschinger, Barbara McGillivray","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0106","url":null,"abstract":"COVID-19 has triggered innovations in science and society globally, leading to the emergence or establishment of formal neologisms such as <jats:italic>infodemic</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>working from home</jats:italic> (<jats:italic>WFH</jats:italic>). While previous work on COVID-related lexical innovation has focused on such formal neologisms, this paper uses data from Reddit to study semantic neologisms like <jats:italic>lockdown</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>mask</jats:italic>, which have changed in meaning due to the pandemic. First, we identify words that have undergone meaning changes since the start of the pandemic. Our approach, based on word embeddings, successfully detects a variety of COVID-related terms that dominate the resulting list of semantic neologisms. Next, we generate community-specific semantic representations for the communities <jats:italic>r/Coronavirus</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>r/conspiracy</jats:italic>, which are both highly engaged in COVID-related discourse. We analyse socio-semantic variation along two dimensions: an evaluative dimension, based on amelioration/pejorization, and the loyalty/betrayal dimension of Moral Foundations Theory. Our findings reveal that the detected semantic neologisms exhibit more negative and betrayal-related associations in <jats:italic>r/conspiracy</jats:italic>, a subreddit critical of COVID-related sociopolitical measures. Mapping the community-specific representations for the term <jats:italic>vaccines</jats:italic> on a shared semantic space confirms these differences and reveals more fine-grained denotational and connotational differences between the two communities.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Liesbet De Vos, Jens Nevens, Paul Van Eecke, Katrien Beuls
{"title":"Construction grammar and procedural semantics for human-interpretable grounded language processing","authors":"Liesbet De Vos, Jens Nevens, Paul Van Eecke, Katrien Beuls","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2022-0054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2022-0054","url":null,"abstract":"Grounded language processing is a crucial component in many artificial intelligence systems, as it allows agents to communicate about their physical surroundings. State-of-the-art approaches typically employ deep learning techniques that perform end-to-end mappings between natural language expressions and representations grounded in the environment. Although these techniques achieve high levels of accuracy, they are often criticized for their lack of interpretability and their reliance on large amounts of training data. As an alternative, we propose a fully interpretable, data-efficient architecture for grounded language processing. The architecture is based on two main components. The first component comprises an inventory of human-interpretable concepts learned through task-based communicative interactions. These concepts connect the sensorimotor experiences of an agent to meaningful symbols that can be used for reasoning operations. The second component is a computational construction grammar that maps between natural language expressions and procedural semantic representations. These representations are grounded through their integration with the learned concepts. We validate the architecture using a variation on the CLEVR benchmark, achieving an accuracy of 96 %. Our experiments demonstrate that the integration of a computational construction grammar with an inventory of interpretable grounded concepts can effectively achieve human-interpretable grounded language processing in the CLEVR environment.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140150423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The role of syntax in hashtag popularity","authors":"Ming Feng Wan","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0051","url":null,"abstract":"Research on hashtag popularity presumes hashtag popularity to be correlated with its semantics and lexical clarity, and the popularity of its topic. However, within a single event, hashtags of identical stances can have contrasting popularity; one may attribute this to the assumption that a certain type of hashtag is preferred, but hashtags of identical syntactic format can also have contradictory popularity across events. We theorize that a hashtag’s popularity is heavily impacted by whether there are preexisting popular hashtags of similar syntactic format within the language.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140115356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“All women are like that”: an overview of linguistic deindividualization and dehumanization of women in the incelosphere","authors":"Ewelina Prażmo","doi":"10.1515/lingvan-2023-0112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0112","url":null,"abstract":"This article provides an overview of linguistic strategies used in the incel community to deindividualize and dehumanize women. Among the most common ways of referring to women there is the use of generic labels (<jats:italic>Stacy</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>Becky</jats:italic>), conceptual metaphor (<jats:italic>warpig</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>landwhale</jats:italic>) including creative metaphorical morphology (<jats:italic>foid</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>femoid</jats:italic>), conceptual metonymy (<jats:italic>hole</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>extrahole</jats:italic>), and conceptual metaphtonymy (<jats:italic>roastie</jats:italic>). The consistent use of such terms within the incelosphere contributes to perpetuating harmful attitudes and potentially even justifying violent and abusive conduct towards women. For this reason, the language of dehumanization in general, and the misogynist discourse of incels in particular, warrants closer attention. This study is carried out within the methodological framework of cognitive semantics and adds to the expanding research on the discourse of the manosphere and the incelosphere.","PeriodicalId":55960,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics Vanguard","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140105998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}