Evaluative Morphology in Georgian

With examples drawn from over 200 world languages, this ground-breaking volume presents a state-of-the-art overview of evaluative morphology. Offering an innovative approach to major theoretical questions, the Edinburgh Handbook analyses the field from a cross-linguistic perspective, considering semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects, as well as word-formation processes and evaluative morphology acquisition. Complementing the synchronic approach with a diachronic perspective, this study establishes a picture of intriguing diversity in evaluative morphology manifestations, and offers a comprehensive analysis of the situation in dozens of languages and language families. Divided into 2 distinct parts, the handbook begins with 13 chapters discussing evaluative morphology in relation to areas such as pragmatics, semantics, linguistic universals and sociolinguistics. The second part is comprised of descriptive chapters, broken into the following subsets: Eurasia, South- East Asia and Oceania, Australia-New Guinea, Africa, North America and South America.

Clitics, affixes, and wordhood in Garifuna (Arawak): A multidimensional continuum of morphosyntactic boundness

Recent research on wordhood and morphosyntactic boundness suggests that the domains word and clitic do not lend themselves to cross-linguistic categorization but must be defined language specifically. In most languages, it is necessary to define word on two separate levels, the phonological word (p-word) and the grammatical word (g-word), and to describe mismatches between the two. This paper defines those domains for Garifuna, an Arawak language spoken in Honduras, Central America. Garifuna has auxiliary and classifier constructions which make up two p-words, and only one g-word. P-words made up of more than one g-word involve second position enclitics, word scope clitics, and proclitic connectives and prepositions. Garifuna clitics are typically unstressed, able to attach to hosts of any word class and able to string together into clusters. Enclitics are used to express tense-aspect, modality, and adverbial meanings, among others. In other languages, clitic clusters tend to display a fixed order; Garifuna clitic order seems quite free, although certain orders are preferred. Also, contrary to cross-linguistic tendencies, proclitic connectives can act as hosts for enclitic clusters, contradicting the commonly used definition of clitics as phonologically weak elements that need to attach to a host to form a p-word; such clitic-only p-words are problematic for traditional definitions of clitics.

Discourse-level Annotation over Europarl for Machine Translation: Connectives and Pronouns

This paper describes methods and results for the annotation of two discourse-level phenomena, connectives and pronouns, over a multilingual parallel corpus. Excerpts from Europarl in English and French have been annotated with disambiguation information for connectives and pronouns, for about 3600 tokens. This data is then used in several ways: for cross-linguistic studies, for training automatic disambiguation software, and ultimately for training and testing discourse-aware statistical machine translation systems. The paper presents the annotation procedures and their results in detail, and overviews the first systems trained on the annotated resources and their use for machine translation.

Traductología : Exploración de un enfoque feminista de la traducción

Este trabajo se propone presentar la transformación de la Traductología desde la perspectiva de los Estudios de Género, dos campos del conocimiento que reconocen una impronta multi e interdisciplinaria. En cuanto a la primera, el giro cultural de los ochenta marca el momento en que se incluye a la traducción dentro del conjunto de subsistemas culturales con intereses competitivos y sujetos a las ideologías predominantes (Molina Martínez, 2006: 37). Paralelamente se instala en Canadá un terreno de estudio que vincula los desarrollos transculturales y translingüísticos surgidos de los movimientos feministas de los años setenta con la producción y recepción de textos, temas que son abarcados por la investigación sobre género y traducción. En ese contexto surge la noción de traducción en femenino o reescritura en femenino cuya finalidad es subvertir el lenguaje patriarcal y reivindicar las ideas feministas (Lotbinière-Harwood, 1991). Las estrategias discursivas y textuales utilizadas para resolver los problemas de traducción relacionados con el género "suplementación o compensación, la metatextualidad, el secuestro y el pacto especular" suelen recurrir al empleo de un lenguaje con alteraciones semánticas, neologismos o innovaciones lingüísticas, cuyo propósito es cuestionar la lengua actual y, a su vez, visibilizar la presencia femenina (Castro Vázquez, 2008: 296-298). En esta ponencia, nos detendremos en discutir y ejemplificar las estrategias citadas

Traductología : Exploración de un enfoque feminista de la traducción

Este trabajo se propone presentar la transformación de la Traductología desde la perspectiva de los Estudios de Género, dos campos del conocimiento que reconocen una impronta multi e interdisciplinaria. En cuanto a la primera, el giro cultural de los ochenta marca el momento en que se incluye a la traducción dentro del conjunto de subsistemas culturales con intereses competitivos y sujetos a las ideologías predominantes (Molina Martínez, 2006: 37). Paralelamente se instala en Canadá un terreno de estudio que vincula los desarrollos transculturales y translingüísticos surgidos de los movimientos feministas de los años setenta con la producción y recepción de textos, temas que son abarcados por la investigación sobre género y traducción. En ese contexto surge la noción de traducción en femenino o reescritura en femenino cuya finalidad es subvertir el lenguaje patriarcal y reivindicar las ideas feministas (Lotbinière-Harwood, 1991). Las estrategias discursivas y textuales utilizadas para resolver los problemas de traducción relacionados con el género "suplementación o compensación, la metatextualidad, el secuestro y el pacto especular" suelen recurrir al empleo de un lenguaje con alteraciones semánticas, neologismos o innovaciones lingüísticas, cuyo propósito es cuestionar la lengua actual y, a su vez, visibilizar la presencia femenina (Castro Vázquez, 2008: 296-298). En esta ponencia, nos detendremos en discutir y ejemplificar las estrategias citadas

Traductología : Exploración de un enfoque feminista de la traducción

Este trabajo se propone presentar la transformación de la Traductología desde la perspectiva de los Estudios de Género, dos campos del conocimiento que reconocen una impronta multi e interdisciplinaria. En cuanto a la primera, el giro cultural de los ochenta marca el momento en que se incluye a la traducción dentro del conjunto de subsistemas culturales con intereses competitivos y sujetos a las ideologías predominantes (Molina Martínez, 2006: 37). Paralelamente se instala en Canadá un terreno de estudio que vincula los desarrollos transculturales y translingüísticos surgidos de los movimientos feministas de los años setenta con la producción y recepción de textos, temas que son abarcados por la investigación sobre género y traducción. En ese contexto surge la noción de traducción en femenino o reescritura en femenino cuya finalidad es subvertir el lenguaje patriarcal y reivindicar las ideas feministas (Lotbinière-Harwood, 1991). Las estrategias discursivas y textuales utilizadas para resolver los problemas de traducción relacionados con el género "suplementación o compensación, la metatextualidad, el secuestro y el pacto especular" suelen recurrir al empleo de un lenguaje con alteraciones semánticas, neologismos o innovaciones lingüísticas, cuyo propósito es cuestionar la lengua actual y, a su vez, visibilizar la presencia femenina (Castro Vázquez, 2008: 296-298). En esta ponencia, nos detendremos en discutir y ejemplificar las estrategias citadas

Bilingual Polytechnic Dictionary of Metaphors: Spanish to English

This paper provides an overview of an ongoing research project work: “A Polytechnical Bilingual Dictionary of Metaphors: Spanish-English/English-Spanish” done by the UPM consolidated research group “DISCYT” (Estudios Cognitivos del Discurso Científico-Técnico). A detailed explanation of the method adopted to identify key metaphors collected from the different subject areas is included. Drawing from recognized empirical methods (Pragglejaz 2007, Cameron 2007, Steen 2007), the examples have been examined according to the main tenets of conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration theory (Deignan 2005, Gibbs 2008, Lakoff 1993, Lakoff & Johnson 1999, Steen 2007, Fauconnier & Turner 2008). This forthcoming dictionary comprises metaphors of over 10 scientific and technical areas such as Aeronautical engineering, Agronomy, Architecture, Biotechnology, Civil engineering, Geology and Mining, Mechanical engineering, Nanotechnology, Naval and Maritime engineering, Sports and Telecommunications. In this paper, we focus on the study of examples taken from civil engineering, materials engineering and naval engineering. Representative cases are analyzed from several points of view (multimodal metaphor, linguistic information strategies and translation into target language) highlighting cross linguistic variations between Spanish and English.

A taste of the technical cuisine: metals and other ingredients

According to cognitive linguistics, language has an experiential origin based on perception, sensory motor activities and our knowledge of the world. Our thought operates by establishing similarities, links and associations that enable us to talk about one thing in terms of another as shown in the example of love as a journey (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Metaphor and metonymy are conceptual and linguistic tools that make possible most of these cognitive operations. Since metaphor is an essential element of human communication, the discourse of specialised disciplines includes metaphorical mappings and numerous examples of metaphorical expressions, for example in economics, where business is mapped in terms of war (White, 2004; Herrera & White, 2000), electrotechnics with electrical components understood as couples (Roldán- Riejos in preparation) or in civil engineering where a bridge is conceptualized as a person (Roldán-Riejos, 2013). In this paper, the metaphors: WORKING WITH METALS IS COOKING/ TRABAJAR CON METALES ES COCINAR and METALS ARE CULINARY OBJECTS/ LOS METALES SON OBJETOS CULINARIOS are explored. The main aim is to show that the cooking metaphor is widely spread in the metallurgical domain in English and Spanish, although with different nuances in each language due to socio-cultural factors. The method adopted consists of analysing examples taken from the: Bilingual Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Metaphors and Metonymies Spanish- English/English-Spanish, a forthcoming and rigorously documented bilingual dictionary that sums up research on conceptual, linguistic and visual metaphor and metonymy in different areas of engineering (Roldán-Riejos and Molina, 2013). The present paper studies in detail English and Spanish cross-linguistic correspondences related to types of metals and processes. It is suggested that they reflect synesthetic metaphoric mappings. The exploitation of cognitive conceptual metaphor in the ESP classroom is lastly recommended.

Advanced receivers for next generation wireless communication systems

Despite extensive progress on the theoretical aspects of spectral efficient communication systems, hardware impairments, such as phase noise, are the key bottlenecks in next generation wireless communication systems. The presence of non-ideal oscillators at the transceiver introduces time varying phase noise and degrades the performance of the communication system. Significant research literature focuses on joint synchronization and decoding based on joint posterior distribution, which incorporate both the channel and code graph. These joint synchronization and decoding approaches operate on well designed sum-product algorithms, which involves calculating probabilistic messages iteratively passed between the channel statistical information and decoding information. Channel statistical information, generally entails a high computational complexity because its probabilistic model may involve continuous random variables. The detailed knowledge about the channel statistics for these algorithms make them an inadequate choice for real world applications due to power and computational limitations. In this thesis, novel phase estimation strategies are proposed, in which soft decision-directed iterative receivers for a separate A Posteriori Probability (APP)-based synchronization and decoding are proposed. These algorithms do not require any a priori statistical characterization of the phase noise process. The proposed approach relies on a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP)-based algorithm to perform phase noise estimation and does not depend on the considered modulation/coding scheme as it only exploits the APPs of the transmitted symbols. Different variants of APP-based phase estimation are considered. The proposed algorithm has significantly lower computational complexity with respect to joint synchronization/decoding approaches at the cost of slight performance degradation. With the aim to improve the robustness of the iterative receiver, we derive a new system model for an oversampled (more than one sample per symbol interval) phase noise channel. We extend the separate APP-based synchronization and decoding algorithm to a multi-sample receiver, which exploits the received information from the channel by exchanging the information in an iterative fashion to achieve robust convergence. Two algorithms based on sliding block-wise processing with soft ISI cancellation and detection are proposed, based on the use of reliable information from the channel decoder. Dually polarized systems provide a cost-and spatial-effective solution to increase spectral efficiency and are competitive candidates for next generation wireless communication systems. A novel soft decision-directed iterative receiver, for separate APP-based synchronization and decoding, is proposed. This algorithm relies on an Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE)-based cancellation of the cross polarization interference (XPI) followed by phase estimation on the polarization of interest. This iterative receiver structure is motivated from Master/Slave Phase Estimation (M/S-PE), where M-PE corresponds to the polarization of interest. The operational principle of a M/S-PE block is to improve the phase tracking performance of both polarization branches: more precisely, the M-PE block tracks the co-polar phase and the S-PE block reduces the residual phase error on the cross-polar branch. Two variants of MMSE-based phase estimation are considered; BW and PLP.

Evolution in romance verbal systems

The present book focuses on evolution in the Romance verbal systems. In the wake of Bybee’s and Dahl’s studies, it advocates the benefits of adopting a cross-linguistic and diachronic approach to the study of linguistic phenomena. Within the scope of the Romance family, similar cross-linguistic evolution paths are explored, as related languages at different stages of grammaticalisation may shed light on each other’s developments. A diachronic dimension also proves desirable for several reasons. First, a diachronic approach significantly enhances the explanatory power of linguistic theory by showing how a specific form came to convey a certain function. Second, change is better revealed in diachronic movement than in static synchrony. Third, meaning constantly evolves and a one-off probe will be less revealing than a sustained study through time. Finally and most importantly, similarities across languages appear more obviously in diachrony. All the chapters of this volume participate in their own way to that crosslinguistic and diachronic approach and help make it an original, focused contribution that covers all main Romance languages.

Introduction

The present book focuses on evolution in the Romance verbal systems. In the wake of Bybee’s and Dahl’s studies, it advocates the benefits of adopting a cross-linguistic and diachronic approach to the study of linguistic phenomena. Within the scope of the Romance family, similar cross-linguistic evolution paths are explored, as related languages at different stages of grammaticalisation may shed light on each other’s developments. A diachronic dimension also proves desirable for several reasons. First, a diachronic approach significantly enhances the explanatory power of linguistic theory by showing how a specific form came to convey a certain function. Second, change is better revealed in diachronic movement than in static synchrony. Third, meaning constantly evolves and a one-off probe will be less revealing than a sustained study through time. Finally and most importantly, similarities across languages appear more obviously in diachrony. All the chapters of this volume participate in their own way to that crosslinguistic and diachronic approach and help make it an original, focused contribution that covers all main Romance languages.

Semantic Categorization in Portuguese-English Bilinguals

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the cross-linguistic interactions in the semantic categorization of late Portuguese-English bilinguals. The lexical items used in this study have a wider range of applications in one language and narrower in the other. Three types of categories were examined: classical, homophones, and radials. Late Portuguese-English bilinguals, as well as Portuguese and English monolinguals, were tested. After hearing a word, participants were asked to choose from a set of images, one that could be labelled as such. Analyses showed that when tested in English, participants performed better when it was the wider language. Participants’ performance was lower on classical categories than on homophone and radial categories.