118 research outputs found
Peau d'Âne et autres contes touaregs
No full textInternational audienceCet ouvrage livre et commente la version originale et la traduction française de neuf contes touaregs, recueillis à la fin des années 1970 et au début des années 1980 au nord du Niger. L'ensemble est illustré par des dessins de Katia Pertsova. Voir extrait dans : http://books.google.fr/books?id=Ab5sqylNd3IC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr#v=onepage&q&f=fals
PRONOM
No full textPRONOM is a database of pronominal paradigms from a genetically and geographically balanced sample of languages. It includes free pronouns as well as bound verbal and nominal agreement morphology that involves person (e.g., possessive morphology on nouns, verbal subject agreement affixes, etc.). The database was intended to be a representative unbiased sample from the languages of the world. We used the following sampling procedure: we assigned languages and genera from the list of 2,679 languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures to six geographical areas. We then picked forty random genera for each region (the smallest number of genera in any region) and 2 random languages from each genus. This would have resulted in 80 languages per geographical area, however, we had to reduce that number to 64 due to the fact that some genera only had one language in them and other genera only had a few languages which were close dialects of each other. Thus, we ended up with 64*8 = 512 languages. Not all of these have been documented to date! All data within Pronom was compiled by Dr. Pertsova and her students from original sources, such as grammars, dictionaries, and grammatical sketches. This version of the data is used in the paper "A CASE FOR A BINARY FEATURE UNDERLYING CLUSIVITY: THE POSSIBILITY OF ABA." by K.Pertsova to be published in Morphology (2022)
Сравнительный анализ ранних и поздних рукописей Хлебникова
No full textThe materials of the research are two main Khlebnikov’s manuscripts : the convolute of the early notebooks (RGALI, f. 527, № 60 ; 1907-1908, about 250 pp.) and the so-called “Grossbux” (RGALI, f. 527, № 64 ; 1919-1921, about 200 pp.). The manuscripts mentioned reflect the very process of creating poetry at the early and late stages of the poet’s life. In both cases in addition to these representative collections we have their “essences” : the cycle of 17 poems sent to Vjacheslav Ivanov in March 1908 (The Russian National Library) for the early manuscripts and “Zangezi” for the late. The main topics of the talk will be comparisons between the early convolute and the cycle sent to Ivanov, “Grossbux” and different variants of “Zangezi”, the early convolute and “Grossbux”, and the cycle sent to Ivanov and different variants of “Zangezi”. The main hero of the convolute is the word itself. The poet invents his own vocabulary on the basis of Russian, observes different stems, different suffixes and different ways of their combination. His studies have something in common with mathematical experiments. While creating new words he often draws specific abstract pictures composed of small homogeneous elements. There are a lot of linguistic notes and hundreds of poems (many of them are still unpublished) in these notebooks.
The poems from the notebooks were the main source of Khlebnikov’s books edited and published by D. Burljuk and A. Kruchjonykh in 1913-1914. At the same time the only cycle composed not by his editors but by Khlebnikov himself -the cycle sent to Ivanov -has never been published in its original form, though both the choice of the poems and their sequence seem remarkable : they give new light, new stylistics to themes and images common for the symbolism.
“Grossbux” is a collection of Khlebnikov’s post-revolutionary poetry. In this notebook neologisms are not the aim, but only a means : by this time he has mastered the art of coinage. Neither abstract ornaments nor vocabulary notes can be found there. Instead we see some realistic drawings (portraits, a sketch “Zangezi on a cliff’), and a lot of lists (such as “The types of languages”) and plans. Most of the plans are devoted to the composition of “Zangezi”. One of the main differences between preliminary plans of “Zangezi” and the final realization is the omission of personal motives. But in all versions of “Zangezi” dominates the idea of contrasts, of oppositions of separate “planes”, which creates a new type of text -“supertext”.Pertsova N. N. Сравнительный анализ ранних и поздних рукописей Хлебникова. In: Modernités Russes, n°8, 2009. Velimir Xlebnikov, poète futurien. pp. 87-117
La tente dans la solitude: La société et les morts chez les Touaregs Kel-Ferwan
No full textInternational audienceThe Kel Ferwan Tuareg roam beyond the gates of the old city of Agadez (northern Niger), moving their heavy tents of palm mats. The tent of the Kel Ferwan is held to be a replica of the cosmos : ist circular base is analogous to the earth circle, its spherical form recalls that of the celestial vault, and its four stakes are similar to the four pillars said to uphold the sky at the four corners of the earth. Long ago, God gave this design to the Tuareg, and ever since, their tents, always reconstructed according to this unchanging celestial model, have been passed down from mother to dauthter.To thent belongs to the wife ; the husband, though he be the tent's " master ", is always but a guest. As soon as a young man begins to grow up, he leaves his mother's tent to pursue an uncertain way of life, sharing makeshift palm mat shelters with his peers. He comes back into a tent only upon marriage, and divorce or widowhood can always return him to the adolescent's precarious position.At the same time however, the tents which belong to women and to which an entire symbolic system assigns feminin qualities, are organized around men : each camp assembles a man, his sons, his wife and his daughters-in-law. The essential nature of Tuareg social life, the rhythmical unfolding of which is described in this book, is contained within the paradox represented by camps of men living in tents belonging to women. Read online:http://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/6143La tente dans la solitude. La société et les morts chez les Touaregs Kel-Ferwan a été publié en 1987. Le livre est consacré à une évocation des valeurs selon lesquelles s'ordonne une société touarègue sahélienne. Dans cette société de nomades, les tentes appartiennent aux femmes. La jeune épousée vient installer dans le campement de son mari une tente qu'elle a reçue des mains maternelles et revient avec elle dans le campement des siens en cas de divorce ou de veuvage. S'ils passent comme leurs sœurs les années d'enfance dans la tente de leur mère, les garçons la désertent dès qu'ils atteignent la puberté et doivent jusqu'au mariage vivre dans des abris sommaires à l'écart des campements. Un homme retrouve une tente quand il prend épouse, mais il n'habitera jamais la tente de cette étrangère comme il habitait, petit garçon, celle où sa mère lui a donné le jour ; et, serait-il un vieillard considéré, le divorce ou le veuvage le ramène à la position précaire des adolescents qui vont sans tente. Les hommes sont donc en quelque sorte extérieurs à la tente, de laquelle en revanche l'usage et le langage font un domaine féminin.Tout cela est solennisé par la cérémonie des épousailles, durant laquelle il est rappelé que le mariage est pour l'époux l'entrée dans une tente où il n'est qu'un hôte, tandis qu'il est pour l'épouse le passage sans hiatus de la tente où sa mère l'a élevée à celle dont sa mère lui a fait don. On en trouve également une manière d'écho dans la terminologie de parenté : de même qu'une femme a un statut unique par rapport à la tente, de même elle dispose d'un terme unique pour désigner ses descendants, qui pour elle sont tous des " enfants " ; tandis que pour l'homme, le fait qu'il appelle " neveux " les enfants nés des tentes de ses sœurs répond assez bien au fait que, pour qu'une épouse lui donne des " enfants ", il doit quitter une tente dont ses sœurs au contraire resteront proches.Plus encore, le voile dont il dissimule son visage - ce voile qu'il prend l'habitude de revêtir à l'époque de sa vie où il s'éloigne de la tente maternelle et qu'il porte au plus haut le jour où les épousailles le font entrer dans une tente étrangère - est aux yeux des Touaregs le signe de son extériorité par rapport à ce domaine féminin qu'est la tente. Cette extériorité l'expose à la malveillance des kel-esuf, " ceux de la solitude ", êtres maléfiques qui errent sans repos aux lisières des espaces habités, et dont on dit qu'ils plongent dans le mutisme ou la déraison ceux qui d'aventure les rencontrent. Il semble que le voile a pour fonction de protéger les hommes de la malveillance de ces êtres, alors que les femmes, en raison de leur affinité avec les tentes, en sont plus naturellement protégées. L'unique occasion où cette protection s'abolit est le déménagement : leurs tentes étant repliées, les femmes retrouvent alors l'espace d'un instant des périls qui pour les hommes sont quotidiens, et doivent s'en garder. Comme pour manifester que le port du voile est le lot d'hommes privés de tentes - ou du moins d'une chaleureuse intimité avec les tentes -, on appelle les femmes " celles des tentes " tandis que leurs compagnons sont appelés " les voiles ". Plusieurs des illustrations de l'ouvrage sont dues à Katia Pertsova. Voir le texte en ligne : http://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/614
A case for a binary feature underlying clusivity: the possibility of ABA
No full textThis paper reevaluates claims about the status of inclusive pronouns and introduces a new database of pronominal morphology. There are conflicting views about inclusive person: on the traditional view inclusive person is a subcategory of first person, but there are disagreements about whether it realizes a privative feature or a binary one; on other views inclusive is its own separate category.
In this paper, I use evidence from patterns of syncretism, suppletion, and morphological relatedness to reevaluate claims about inclusives with a new pronominal database of 270 genetically and geographically diverse languages. I find support for the traditional view that inclusive is a type of first person. However, my findings go against recent approaches to morphological features based on privative contrasts that create containment relationships and predict the so-called *ABA-constraint (Bobaljik, 2012; Caha, 2009; Moskal, 2018). I show several examples of ABA patterns in the data and no stark asymmetry between frequencies of inclusives derived from exclusives compared to the reverse situation. Both of these facts support the view that clusivity is due to a binary featural contrast. I propose a feature hierarchy that incorporates such a binary contrast and captures a number of facts about pronominal paradigms that go beyond patterns of clusivity
Morphophonological Learning: The effects of frequency and phonological distribution when language learners generalize plural suffixes
No full textThe present study examines how people learn language patterns involving plural suffixes. In languages with multiple plural suffixes, there may be a “default” suffix that speakers automatically resort to except when there are exceptions. Oftentimes, the default suffix occurs more frequently than the exceptions. However, it is also possible to have a “minority default,” which occurs more infrequently than the exceptions. The present study examined how well learners would be able to identify the default suffix when it occurred at the same frequency as the exceptional suffixes (control condition) and when it occurred more infrequently (experimental condition). The results show that participants learned the default equally well in both situations. Therefore, people can still learn the default rule even when it occurs infrequently.Bachelor of Art
Count or Context: Investigating Methods of Text Analysis
No full textUsing text as a source of psychological and cognitive information has become a popular
subject (Robinson, Navea & Ickes, 2013; Donahue, Liang & Druckman, 2014; Wolfe &
Goldman, 2003). To do this, researchers use a variety of methods to analyze text, but Linguistic
Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) has become one the more common techniques. LIWC is a tokenbased
method that contains multiple dictionaries representing various psychological states
(positive affect, leisure, religion, social words) and keeps a running tabulation of how many
words in a given text occur in each category. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a context-based
method that uses statistics to calculate similarity between different texts based off the
surrounding words. As a common strategy of analyzing text for psychological states, it is
important LIWC be truly representative of the aspects it explores. The dictionaries must
accurately represent the categories they measure to be an authentic assessment of the analyzed
psychological and cognitive states.
This current study seeks to use LSA to improve LIWC. The hypothesis is that a
combination method of the two will perform better than the application of a single token-based
method. LIWC and two other token-based methods were compared to a combination LSA-token
method. The two techniques were applied to a set of headlines that had been previously judged
by humans in terms of emotion and positive/negative valence. The first part of the experiment
compared the token-based methods to confirm that they were different from each other but still
successful measures of the stimuli. The second part of the experiment compared the correlation
between the token-based method and the correct response of the pre-tagged data against the
correlation of the combination method and the pre-tagged stimuli. The findings did not support
the hypothesis, as the combination method performed worse than the token-based methods.
These results, however, suggest further investigation into the power of LSA and its reliance on
context. Specifically, LSA may be suited for analysis of longer, more semantically complex
texts, not short, basic samples, like the headlines used in this study.Bachelor of Art
Transderivational relations and paradigm gaps in Russian verbs
No full textIn this paper I argue that the notorious case of paradigm gaps, the first person singular gaps of Russian verbs, are not synchronically arbitrary as is often assumed (Graudina et al. 1976; Daland et al. 2007; Baerman 2008), but are predictable and connected to the opaque morphophonological alternations affecting stem-final consonants in the 1st person singular (1sg) present tense. I present evidence for a new empirical generalization showing that the problematic alternations in verbs are subject to a 'lexical conservatism 'effect (Steriade 1997). Namely, stems that appear in other derivationally or inflectionally related forms with the same alternation as the one expected in 1sg generally do not have gaps, while stems that have no attested related forms with alternations do. Overall, a larger set of verbs are problematic for the speakers than indicated in dictionaries, and there are degrees of “gappiness” with a lot of variation across speakers. Additionally, I consider how different theoretical proposals for handling ineffability fare in accounting for these findings. I propose to augment the framework of Harmonic Grammar (Legendre et al. 1990) with an additional post-competition step during which outputs can be compared to each other based on their Harmony scores. This proposal is not tied to violations of specific constraint and it has potential to account for both paradigm gaps and gradient grammaticality judgments
Searching for Phonological Amelioration
No full textMany models of phonotactics predict that the judged acceptability of words should generally decline as word length increases. However, it has been observed that in some cases, a word containing elements of poor acceptability may have its overall acceptability ameliorated by other elements of better acceptability. This paper discusses an experiment performed to test the hypothesis that a word of poor acceptability can see its acceptability improve by appending a string of better acceptability, and secondarily, the hypothesis that acceptability indeed declines with length. The results of the experiment show no evidence to support the first hypothesis, but some degree of support for the second
Exploring BERT's Capabilities to Detect English Preposition Errors
No full textPreposition errors are some of the most common errors created by L2 speakers. In addition, improving error correction and detection methods remains an open issue in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This research investigates whether the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers model (BERT) has the potential to correct preposition errors accurately enough to be useful in error correction software. I used an open-source BERT model and over three hundred thousand edited sentences from Wikipedia, tagged for part of speech, where only a preposition edit had occurred. A method of error detection was devised using multi-level masking to generate suggestions based on sentence context for every prepositional environment in the test data. These suggestions were compared with the original errors in the data and their known corrections to evaluate BERT’s performance. This research finds that BERT performs strongly when the scope of its error correction is limited to preposition choice
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