Linguistic Analysis - Science topic

The grading of reading assessment in elementary would better graded specifically using the text reading difficulty level. In this way, the progress of thr learners would be easily traceable.

Regarding linguistic analysis, the researcher should decide the subject areas and purpose of analysis; for example, the linguistic analysis can be in: 1- Stylistic analysis 2- Critical discuses analysis and so on. The next step is to select the levels such as phonological analysis, semantic analysis, lexical analysis or grammatical analysis etc. Narrowing down the subject area of research, purpose of analysis, levels of analysis can help to do it in a better way.

Dear Raphael Neelamkavil

Great comments on the actual situation of philosophy.

You touched a lot of points, but I will try to respond to the core of your reply.

For (1), yes, there is a artificial lack of "metaphysics" in the concepts of the analytic philosophers. And I said it is artificial because it hard to constantly avoid the natural tendency of experience to grasp the external object. I want to believe that the reason is that as the thinghood of things overflows the language, it cannot be studied with the same linguistic tools that they traditionally use. It's not fancy.

However that philosophical position has an historical explanation too.

On the other side (2) you have the scientific point of view that is frequently naïve regarding the substantiality of the objects. In my opinion this problem also has historical roots. It is the result of a constant conflict between science and philosophy. Scientists disregarded philosophy for long time, and some of them still doing it.

(1) and (2) are opposite worlds, but they share the language of logic and formalization methods, and that is related to your final comments.

I remember being in a congress where an analyst philosopher was talking about the marvels of analytic philosophy and how many developments could be used in physics there and there,... I asked him for a particular case where analytical philosophy would made a relevant contribution to physics. He could not mention a single one.

Analytic philosophy is weirdly sterile outside the realm of language, and that is something noticeable when you have so many sophisticated tools, and the reason is because what you were talking at (1).

About the pride... tell me about that! Some days ago I have a long discussion with an analytic epistemologist; clearly he was very proud of his h index (I wont say his name to protect his reputation). He wanted me to accept some definitions by authority, and as reply to my objections I got a lot of ad hominem arguments and the same ideas explained over and over again. As you can imagine, the discussion didn't end very friendly. In his last reply he stated that he has discussed those topics with Quine, before he dies.

-Big deal! I also would not agree with Quine!

Is needless to say that not all analytical philosophers are like that. But it is true that is a common attitude among them.

I will stop my reply here, but a lot about this can be written.

You are welcome, Jonathan; I was happy to help. Feel free to contact me at any time.

Corpus Linguistics. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cllt-2020-0051/html

Take a look here: Analytical Text Programs

, this reminds me of a remark I made years ago in Costa Rica when I saw the name of a university called something like "Universidad Americana". I was surprised to have a US-owned institution in the town. My host quickly replied that we ARE americans! I felt stupid and try ever since not to mix up "America" with the United States of America!

Please check some of the works done by Prof. Ganesh Devy

The major skills you need are text mining and programming with scripting languages like python.

Thank you - all very helpful.

I am not sure that you can prove that one word is better than another, but you can set criteria to judge against.

For example, in the context in which you use it, "chill" is slang and "enjoy" is not. "Observe" is more elevated vocabulary than "see." Elevated vocabulary that is not slang could be among your criteria for evaluating language.

But which vocabulary is best depends on the situation. In some situations, "chill" may be arguably better, or more appropriate, than "enjoy."

Can I recommend this vlog by Prof. Tara Brabazon. She speaks about grey literature in academic research. In ways that support this endeavor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQRMkL4Fbc4

In short, yes, use grey literature.

I am currently drafting a journal article, using Fairclough's discourse analysis in a new an innovative way. Be brave. lead the world. show us your way. If I were you,

I would analyse the secondary texts in the same way i analysed the primary texts, to prove to the reader there is rigor in the analysis, to the degree that I was consistent with the analysis of both types of sources and can therefore compare / link analysis of the primary and secondary texts.

Mayowa Akinlotan : I am fully aware of that and I would never do it myself. In fact, if I were a boss somewhere, I would not allow a person to record any exchange unless all those involved agree willfully. I wrote this question to hear your suggestions as Shatha Naiyf Qaiwer College of Education for Women-English dep. Baghdad University has suggested, which a reasonable alternative.

Perhaps you are referring to the way that corpus linguistics tools enable us to track the "typical" ways in which words are combined? This sheds a lot of light on "priming", for example, which would probably link up with a (fairly) behaviouristic notion of human language, even though, as we all know, these "habits" are only part of the story. The language we produce is not just the outcome of habit!!

Not expecting naivety!

Before you plan how to do content analysis, you must first identify a PROBLEM that you want to address with your study. "Businesses need to better understand _________."

Then develop specific research questions that will help solve the problem.

Once you know your research questions, develop a kind of content analysis to answer each question.

You should find good answers and tips in Pfizer's 'Principles for Clear Health Communication' (edited by LG Doak and CC Doak):

In the paper (DOI: 10.1089/dia.2005.7.528) I mentioned in my original reply above, I cited an earlier version of these principles. The latest 2nd Edition full-text PDF is available at https://www.pfizer.com/files/health/PfizerPrinciples.pdf

See also: Testing information recipients (readers): Powers et al. (2010) DOI: 10.1001/jama.2010.896 'Can this patient read and understand written health information?', which covered Pfizer's 'Newest Vital Sign (English)' https://www.pfizer.com/health/literacy/public-policy-researchers/nvs-toolkit

I agree that you should go beyond saying that your results are "slightly different." In particular, I would recommend calculating an inter-rater reliability index such as Krippendorff"s alpha.

You might also consider whether doing this kind of re-rating is really necessary for your work. In some fields, such as communication studies, inter-rater reliability is almost a requirement in you are doing content analysis on media, but in other fields where qualitative research is more interpretive, it is not considered to be useful.

Dear Djamel Eddine Benchaib,

Good discourse analysis combines attention to the linguistic detail of discourses with in depth analysis of the context in which these discourses are produced. Depending on what your research objects and goals are, discourse analysis alone can be a sufficient comprehensive framework. If you intend to use grounded theory for some reason, you should probably think of it as an alternative comprehensive framework for doing your research, which influences and organizes the way you gather and analyze data from the start. Some discourse analytical methods may become a part of that (rather than being applied in a completely independent initial phase - a priori, that idea seems less promising).

If you want to look at what people do when they choose names, find the best records, f.i. church registers for a given period. If you want to know what they think they do, questionnaires may serve your purpose, but a lot of people won´t fill in or answer questionnaires - at least in my country. So with questionnaires the resulting collection may be skewered.

Hi Jamie,

like Julia said above, we might need to know something about your purpose before we can advise. Does your task involve presenting written stimuli? Or is there another reason why you think orthographic measures of length might be especially important for your study?

I do feel a bit unsettled by the idea of combining an orthographic and phonological measure of length. Its will be so hard to work out what might be underpinning any effect. Could you perhaps use two alternate (non-composite) measures and choose the one that captures the most variability (if your interest isn't really length)? So for example, syllable number and phoneme number? Or alternatively, if length is the thing of interest, could you compare the effectiveness of alternate measures directly in a regression-type situation?

You;d have to watch with the second option, though, because the more variability a measure has, the better it will predict - so number of phonemes or letters both have a huge advantage over number of syllables here.

Carolyn

It is a bit older now, but the work of Jabari Mahiri might give you some ideas.  He did his fieldwork on youth and schooling by coaching a basketball league.

Mahiri, Jabari. Shooting for excellence: African American and youth culture in new century schools. National Council of Teachers of English, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096 (Stock No. 44632-3050: $19.95 members, $26.95 nonmembers)., 1998.

1. The language organ- proposing the biological genesis of language.

2. Proto-world & the monogenesis of current languages.

Again, as above,  the nature-nurture dichotomy seems to be the predominant strands of thought. One can situate arguments quite reasonably along one of these veins. Citations have been given by some in this forum.

Answer to P.A. Brandt’s  question What is the rationale of metonymy?

Dear Per Aage,

I think one could say that generally referential metonymy is a focussing construction. But you are quite right, it may serve several different functions just as any noun phrase. It may identify ad hoc a particular person or thing (the French fries is waiting for his bill, the gallstone is in the upstairs ward) or a category (the best brains in Britain were set to solve the problem, I smell skunk [the kind of smell that skunks have]). Such category names may lexicalise: There is a wire for you [telegram], he wears glasses [spectacles], hardhat, paperback, wagtail, etc. Metaphor does not have exclusive rights as to rhetorical force. There are examples of rhetorical metonymy such as: [that which is achieved by] the pen is mightier than [that which is achieved by] the  sword.(Wish it were true)

But this is not what you are after, I think. There ought to be some function exclusive to metonymy. You brought up the example The White House decided to act. We may resort to examples of this kind when it is irrelevant or when we do not know exactly who in the White House decided to act. I can also point to the function demonstrated by the following examples:

1.    The laces of the boots were neatly tied

2.    The boots were neatly tied .

Provided that  boots in (2) is metonymic,  (1) and (2)  express the same proposition. However, they are not equivalent. In (1) laces is the topic, and in (2)  boots is the topic. But the comment is in both cases “were neatly tied”.  That this is the case is confirmed if add a  second comment:

1.   The laces of the boots were neatly tied and they [the laces] were clean.

2.   The boots [its laces] were neatly tied and they [the boots] were clean.

 By promoting  boots to topic position, we express that  the fact that their laces were neatly tied is a property also of the boots. I am not certain  that we could express this in any other way. At least not in such an elegantly succinct manner.

Stephen, that's really cool stuff! Thanks. 

There seems to be work by Sophie Scott.

I couldn't find a specific study, but

this seems to be related:

Other:

Regards,

Joachim

"implicit metapragmatic strategies" are one way of speaking about "norms" and can be addressed from a variety of angles - Politeness Theory, for instance, can be seen as a description of several codified implicit metapragmatic strategies (see Gino Eelen (2000) A Critique of Politeness Theories). Another angle is that of theorized indexicality (the language-ideological angle, simply put), and here here, Goffman's "Frames" (and attached to it notions such as footing and entregisterment) can be very inspiring, especially when read through the angle of Agha (2007, Language and Social Relations). Agha stresses the "emblematic" function of certain "frame/register triggers" - particular formal patterns (a word, an intonation contour, a syntactic pattern, a code switch etc) invoke an entire set of expected follow-ups, where "expected" stands for normatively patterned and ordered (also therefore: mutually ratified) discourse in such a way that recognizably meaningful exchanges are enabled. Let's take an example. Two relative strangers at a reception are talking about a joint acquaintance, first in superficial and polite terms restricted to standard descriptive utterances such as "he's quite a force in our field", "he has a very good reputation", until the moment where one of them says "to be honest, he's a bastard"; this, then opens a space in which tone, contents and even variety can change from formal to informal, from superficial to anecdotal gossip, etc. There has been a shift in implicit metapragmatic strategy, one can say.

I think there are two aspects of the question: a) avoiding pronouns and b) avoiding agents for subjects. There is, perhaps, a relation to politeness, but maybe not so direct one.

In Czech, which (same as Polish or Russian) has the aggreement (congruence) of the subject person and the verb ending, using or not using personal pronouns is more of a question of the information structure (topic-focus articulation, theme-rheme etc.). When the focus is on the subject, it is usualy verbalized (be it in a form of a pronoun or a noun); if the subject is out of focus, then the subject is expressed only by the verb ending (that's what transformationalists call "pro-drop"). I'd say that this has little to do with politeness.

What does relate to politeness is the strategy of deagentivization - not making 2nd person the agent/subject of the verb is polite towards the hearer, because one of the semantic propperties of the prototypical subject is the responsibility (that goes hand in hand with the agentivity) and stripping off the responsibility is polite. There are several ways to deagentivize. One is to use passive construction, others is reflexive passives (with "se" and 3rd person sg. verb ending, similar to the "pasiva refleja" in Spanish) and there are more. So instead of "Mohl byste...?" ("Could you...?"), we can say "Bylo by možno...?" ("Would it be possible to...?") (note that both cases are without personal pronouns in Czech, but the second one is more polite, because the hearer is not the subject).

It is clear, that using or not using a personal pronoun is not the question of politeness here. The question is using it in the subject position. In the example below, the pronoun must be used for reasons of the information structure (focalization), but the example ii) is more polite, since the 2nd person pronoun is not in the subject position:

i) "Já to nedokážu. Mohl byste to udělat vy(FOC)?" (I can't do it. Could you(FOC) do it?)

ii) "Já to nedokážu. Bylo by to pro vás(FOC) uskutečnitelné?" (I can't do it. Would it be possible for you(FOC) to do it?)

At least that's my view at the moment.

thank you very much

Hi,

Your question:  Comparing frequency counts between two groups of different sample size, Chi-square?

If your data are in Yes or no type then you have to use Chi-Square test. 

1.  All cells are having >=5, then you can use Chi-Square test. 

2.  If any cell having <5, then you have to use the Fisher's Exact Test.

3.  If any one cell having =0, then you can use the Yates' Chi-Square test.

But, here (now) your data are in count and two groups.  So, you have to use the t-test analysis.  Before that you have to test the normality of the data is must.

All the best.

I DON"T KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS. COU;D YOU PLEASE GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF SUCNH TEXT oF SUCH TEXTS?

So Musharraf's speech is given in Urdu and in English. Languages you both sufficiently speak.That is good. Do you also happen to have studied English and Urdu linguistics? If not it would be good to find someone to assist you to compare the linguistic features related to your research question (e.g. compare means to express something in one language as compared to the other)

Of course you write your analysis in English but the linguistic analysis has to be done based on Urdu linguistics for the Urdu part and based on English linguistic for the English part (if the languages differ with respect to the feature analysed). What specifically is your research question - the structure or phenomenon your interested in? Or is it just a descriptive analysis?

There are transcription rules for Urdu orthography to English (see file attached) to include readable transcriptions in your paper.

Best X.

Hello Wolfgang,

are there any analogies where we have -u- stems with -(s)yo-suffix becoming voiced in Common Slavic? And is that related to PIE *man- (Lat. manus, OldNorse mund "hand, protection"?

1) *dhgm-on-yo- an -n- stem from *dheg- "earth" as pointed out by Caka and myself. This needs ž to be explained by metathesis. There's also the Matasovic law of g lost before m issue. Lithuanian etymology would be helpful.

Possible cognates: Lat. homo, Germ. guma, Lith. žmuo

2) *man-u-syo- originally a derivative from *man- "hand" (?) as in Machek, which needs ž to be explained through voicing.

Possible cognates: OldInd. manusya, Germ. manwaz, Lat. manus

Thanks a lot, Jun Wen.

The corpora in this collection seem to have mainly morphosyntactic annotations and classification as per a thematic taxonomy. I didn't see a corpus with annotations specific to argumentation mining.

Could you perhaps say which corpus you mean?

Kind regards,

Martin

Thanks Cameen.

Though I have a copy of the paper, it seems to have been lost in my list. The paper really provides some refreshing insights to aspects of argumentation. I have resolved to treat argumentation as a separate form of analysis on its own merits though would draw upon some aspects of description (especially metaphorical constructions) as premises. 

Kind regards

Umar,

It is free, only that I don't know how versatile it is and what are other alternatives.

Dear Steven,

here are informative publications:

good luck with your interesting researh

a.

Dear Anju

please read my article on this topic , it could provide some reflections and findings.

good luck with your research

a.

Thank you Mark,

cheers,

Dear Francesc González i Planas

1)

"1) Following Sato (2012), embedded questions in (i) and (ii) can be interpreted as indirect discourses.

(i) Taroo-ga Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga nani-o kat-ta ka to] tazune-ta

(ii) Taroo-ga Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga kare-no hon-o kat-ta ka to] tazune-ta."

First, I want to confirm  the term "indirect discourses". Is the term "indirect discourse" the same as "indirect speech”? If so, I don’t think that the interpretation of Sato (2012) is correct. The problem is the existence of a particle “to”, which functions as a marker of citation as Professor Hyo Lee pointed out in the response to my answer to your question. In fact, in the examples of some articles about the Japanese indirect question that I read, the particle “to” is not used but the particle “o” , marker of a direct object (accusative marker). According to the articles in question, the examples (i)and (ii) will be:

(i’) Taroo-ga Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga nani-o kat-ta ka] o tazune-ta.

(ii’) Taroo-ga Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga kare-no hon-o kat-ta ka] o tazune-ta.

I have another doubt about the interpretation of Sato (2012). Following Sato (2012),. the phrase [kare-no hon] in (ii) refers to “Taro’s book”. But according to my native intuition, [kare] can refer not only to Taro but also to Ziroo and someone else.  

One more thing. To me the examples (i) and (ii) sound a little strange because in a natural Japanese the human subject in the principle clause is not followed, in general, by the particle “ga” but by the particle “wa” that functions as a theme marker. That is, the examples (i) and (ii) will sound more natural if they are changed to;

(i”) Taroo-wa Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga nani-o kat-ta ka] o tazune-ta.

(ii”) Taroo-wa Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga kare-no hon-o kat-ta ka] o tazune-ta.

2)

(iii) [Kare-no hon-o] Taroo-ga Ziroo-ni [dare-ga ___ kat-ta ka to] tazune-ta. ‘Taro asked Ziroo who bought his book.’

(iv) Taroo-wa [kare-no hon-o] Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga ___ kat-ta ka to] tazune-ta.  ‘Taro asked Ziroo if Hanako bought his book

First, I don’t think that the examples (iii) and (iv) are indirect questions because there is a particle “to” in the subordinate clauses “dare-ga ___ kat-ta ka to” and “Hanako-ga ___ kat-ta ka to”.  The correct indirect questions will be;

(iii’) [Kare-no hon-o] Taroo-wa(ga) Ziroo-ni [dare-ga ___ kat-ta ka] o tazune-ta.

(iv’) Taroo-wa [kare-no hon-o] Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga ___ kat-ta ka] o tazune-ta.  ‘Taro asked Ziroo if Hanako bought his book

Interestingly, the examples (iii’) and (iv’) don’t sound well (at least, I will take some time to understand them correctly), if not ungrammatical.

However, the next examples (iii”) and (iv”) which are interpretated as direct questions don’t sound so bad.

(iii”) [Kare-no hon-o] Taroo-wa(ga) Ziroo-ni [dare-ga ___ kat-ta ka] to tazune-ta. ‘Taro asked Ziroo who bought his book.’

(iv’) Taroo-wa [kare-no hon-o] Ziroo-ni [Hanako-ga ___ kat-ta ka] to tazune-ta.  ‘Taro asked Ziroo if Hanako bought his book

I hope my response will be useful for you.

Hiromi Yamamura

Berate, however, is from the English be- tagged on to the obsolete verb to rate, meaning to scold, akin to the Swedish rata, to upbraid.

Ultimately it's all Indo-European, closely akin to Sanskrit and most European language families.

see on Moses website Factored translation models.

Arun

Why not try the question in stackoverflow.com and other sites too?

Narayanan

If the initial text is changed, therefore that ‘grammatical marker means vocative, well, the list is long, almost all flective language have a mark, i.e. ending, for the vocative. But I think the sense of the initial question was different, but the initiator does not seem to illuminate us. Latin or most Slavic languages, as an example, have a specific ending for the vocative, but the list is, of course, longer.

Step 1. Document the language's grammatical structure and vocabulary (Here you need the help of one or more linguists)

Step 2. Design teaching strategies and develop materials that can be used to teach it. (teaching strategies can be a mentoring programme where youths learn directly from interacting with elders, or more traditional class based teaching)

Step 3. Promote its use within the community by improving its practical usefulness (create more situations where the language can be used) and its social prestige (making sure that the most prestigeful people in the society use it and talk positively about it).

These steps can in fact be carried out simultaneously. 

Here are some links to some good literature on the topic:

Antonio Pessott, I have been going through Fant's work, however, I think i am missing something. The model parameter is not being estimated properly.

Hello Shahroz you should follow this link

Dear Fetita,

I didn't come up with such a system that deals with Arabic dialectics. All research focus on classical Arabic language since all articles, news, ads, etc are written in the classical Arabic language. some dialectics word have the same Arabic characters but pronounced differently according to the dialectics.  Other words are synonyms that are used more frequent in a country than another country. As a result, any program will just replace the word with its synonym in the destination dialectics.

I hope this helps you. If you have specific research interest I may help you or find some one who can help.

kind regards 

Hi,

It is old, seems preliminary and I did not use it myself, but you might look at the work of one of Chris Manning students, Imran Q. Sayed. The code seems to search for verb phrases in the sentence.

Best,

Maciej

I thank Dr. Mohammad Hamad Al-khresheh for his reference and his commentary. I wish to complete it on the literary and linguistic side. Your triangulation tools will depend of the nature of your data. Let's presume you will have linguistic data from texts or talk. The texts or transcription will be a first source. You will need a second source, that could come from an observation tool. Let's say the subjects were observed during their writing or discussing. It could also be an inquiry tool (a questionary). All these tools should intend to document the same phenomena, so that you will obtain two or three different point of views of the same reality.

Dear Elspeth,

The problem with considering the rate of acquisition is that it is not accurate enough. If we are dealing with motion we have to apply the principles of kinematics. Acceleration of acquisition, like any physical event is defined basically as the change of velocity over time. If what you mean by rate is VT then one should be able to find out the frequency and the wave length of this VS...Then with the proper equations we will be able to find the right answer to Olga's question.

I think there is a discrepancy between the concept of Open Innovation in economics and

in linguistic . Here, to my mind, is an interesting twisting of the very function of language. According to Jacobson's model the sentence " open innovation" has an informative function but Henry Chesbrough was able to transform its function into the aesthetic and consequently he literally objectified language and made it fulfill his aesthetic propaganda. Apart from concluding that Jacobson's model is flexible from the outside ( the user) ,this very instance proves that Heidegger was wrong. We are not prisoners of our own language-actually that are various instances where we can get out of the system and return very quickly. In other words we can leave the system for a short while but we are doomed to return to our prison. 

Thanks all for the suggestions! I'll look through them

This is an important fact to know as all of us are aware of the speech banana but most of us are unaware of how much is the absolute average values of speech sounds. The best way to understand that is using LTASS measures and understanding the amplitude and frequency of speech sounds used in the Speech spectrum. 

An excellent review article which explains about the origin and also provides us with the values regarding the speech spectrum is published in Ear and Hearing by Olsen, Hawkins and Van Tassel (1987). Please find the link.

Hope this information is useful

Regards,

Prashanth

There is also the aspect that slang can expand on this concept. Using the example of "go": in American English slang there is the expression "you go girl", which is giving it the role of an adjective in the sense of saying the girl is great. Or in the case of 'get up and go' where it means assertive force or ability as a noun. Yet in Chinese, du to the lack of conjugation or many other gramatical constructs it needs to be noted that it is as a result also a far more contextual language. Furthermore, where inflection can infer different meanings on the same words and phrases, the tonal structure in Chinese spoken languages means that inflection should not be used lest one drastically changes the meaning. The split between a written and spoken form of a language is also far more pronounce between Chinese and western languages. I have to correct my not Chinese friends that I speak Mandarin and not Chinese but that I read and write Chinese and not Mandarin but taht Ispeak, read and write English, French and German.

Peter and Dante pointed out the two categories involved in the examples listed. Another Peter wants the criteria for defining inflectional morphemes to be made explicit and Jacob points to a source of information on morphemes. Great work! These views will be considered in the write-up. I am grateful.