1,721,002 research outputs found
Lexical collocations in bilingual dictionaries
No full textElusive yet intuitive at the same time, the concept of collocation has attracted the attention of different branches of linguistics for many a year, owing to the proven pervasiveness of such combinations in languages. Although a universally accepted definition of collocation has not been reached as each attempted description is inextricably related to the linguist’s standpoint, the development of a series of very workable ideas on the nature of these combinations has led to the production of worthy linguistic commodities. While English lexicography has kept pace with the development in lexicology and corpus linguistics, Italian lexicography has only recently started to look in that direction. The author investigates the treatment of lexical collocations in the major bilingual English-Italian dictionaries, looking closely at the lexicographers’ choices while keeping the end users and their heuristics in mind
This sounds odd to me: issues of collocational acceptability in an English-Italian dictionary
No full textThe present work aims to assess the acceptability of a set ofcollocations from the point of view of a native speaker who uses the language actively. A survey of 50 Italian collocations selected from the Il RagazziniEnglish-Italian dictionary (2013 edition) was carried out with the participation of 20 native Italian speakers who were asked to judge the examples providedon the basis of acceptability and usage . Analysis of the results confirms that, when it comes to collocations, the speakers’ judgments are extremely heterogeneous. Moreover, the percentage of collocations deemed questionable or unacceptable is hefty , calling for reflection on the kind of language that is represented in dictionaries. From the point of view of usage , the data are not encouraging either, as many peripheral collocations seemed to be provided. The paper reflects on the practical and theoretical implications of such findings
Can collocations be translated automatically? An evaluation of available machine translation services on a sample of ‘adjective + noun’ combinations
Full text linkRecent technological development has had a deep and positive impact on automatic translation. The increase in terms of size and number of parallel corpora produced in many different languages, in conjunction with considerable improvement in the available algorithms, have seen machine translation enter a new stage. In particular, a shift in the paradigm from statistical to neural network-based machine translation has successfully addressed many shortcomings of traditional machine translation systems, thus improving the quality of the proposed translations. So far, collocations and idiomatic expressions have failed to be properly handled by machine translation services. This study sets out to investigate how such combinations are dealt with by automatic machine translation systems in light of their popularity amongst learners. After analysing the Italian translation of a sample of 282 ‘adjective + noun’ English collocations, we have concluded that, although much progress has been made in recent years, collocations still pose a challenge to automatic translation. In reception tasks, MTSs can certainly help users obtain basic understanding of the collocation in the foreign language. Yet, if users are to translate collocations from their mother tongue into the foreign language, such services cannot be trusted blindly as more work is needed for the production of well-formed, natural stretches of language, particularly with respect to the translation of strong collocations
Translating collocations : an analysis of the resources available on and offline
No full textIn the last few years, more and more lexicographic reference tools have been appearing on the Internet with the result that an increasing number of students have been turning away from the more traditional paper and electronic dictionaries. In particular, the linguistic dif culties that collocations give rise to explain why Italian learners of English now often resort to sites such as Just-the-word.com, Phrases.net, Prowritingaid. com, Ozdic.com, Wordreference.com to translate word combinations into English. While there is no doubt that such tools are an important support for language encoding, their value and ef ciency must be ascertained, especially in view of the fact that they often come from unknown sources. The aim of the present work is to compare the treatment of collocations in online vs. traditional of ine tools, focussing in particular on three criteria: user-friendliness, the amount of word combinations available, and their quality
Adumbrating word combination: metalexicological description in 18th and 19th century English grammars for native speakers
No full textThe gradual transition from a prescriptive approach to a more descriptive one in grammar writing seems to emerge when analysing the treatment of lexical and grammatical words in 18th- and 19th-century English grammar books for native speakers. This essay will show that certain 18th- and 19thcentury grammarians were already sensitive to the fact that the selection and employment of words is determined by both the linguistic and the extra-linguistic environment. Although no precise mention of the term word combination is made in these works, the present study aims to identify some of the metalexicological descriptions that acknowledge that words do not have independent meanings and functions, but are influenced by what precedes or follows them, foreshadowing the lexicological tenets of contemporary linguists
Transferring tacit knowledge: learning how to sing through YouTube
No full textExpert-novice communication is a particularly challenging area of study where the learning
process is conceived of as polarized between following instructions and gaining experience.
The case of singing is especially challenging in that the visual component – key to acquiring
complex motor skills – is almost completely absent. As a consequence, in order to transmit
his/her expertise, the vocal coach will rely heavily on verbalisation, thus having to reformulate
the expert discourse in order to make it accessible to the novice. This makes the singing jargon
worthy of being looked into from a linguistic point of view, even more so in light of the
paucity of studies that investigate the discourse of learning outside educational settings.
The present study is intended as a linguistic comparison of different approaches to tacit
knowledge transfer, its goal being a qualitative assessment of the strategies employed by three
vocal coaches that have tackled the issue of high notes and shared their videos on YouTube
Language learning applications: analysis of the learners’ opinions
No full textThe field of education has greatly benefited from the contribution of technology since the development of the first CALL systems in the 1960s. The recent spread of language learning mobile applications confirms that learners are particularly keen upon technology-mediated solutions. Indeed, such applications focus upon the users and their needs, and provide them with fast, affordable and efficient tools to learn a new language at their own pace. In this study, we aim to provide preliminary insight into the learners' opinions concerning five amongst the most popular language learning applications available on the market. In order to do so, we have created a corpus of reviews scraped from the Google Play Store between June 2019 and January 2021 that we have analysed with Natural Language Processing tools. The results show that users are generally satisfied with language learning applications and thoroughly enjoy the learning experience. Furthermore, rather than being passive recipients, app users seem to be active agents in the construction of knowledge
Inspecting Linguistic Features in Interaction Transcripts of Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease through Interpretable Machine Learning
No full textAlzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia, affecting over 5 million Americans every year, a figure that is set to more than double by 2050. Although there currently is no approved treatment either to halt AD or to slow down its progressive course, early diagnosis can help improve the lives of the patients as well as those of their caregivers and families as coping strategies take time to be implemented. In recent years, computer science has supported the diagnosis of dementia through machine learning and deep learning techniques. Algorithms have been developed with the aim of automatically classifying and early identifying patients affected by dementia. In these experiments, the primary concern has been the improvement of classification performance, while less attention has been devoted to examining the decisions made by the machine in order to advance knowledge by unravelling new facts regarding the way in which AD patients use language. Thus, the present study sets out to identify the most predictive features that characterise the speech of patients suffering from AD by inspect- ing the choices made by an algorithm trained to discriminate between transcripts of AD patients and of healthy subjects with the tools provided by linguistics and within an interpretable machine learning paradigm
- …
