Exploitation of linguistic ambiguity in Polish and English jokes

English & Polish jokes based on linguistic ambiguity are constrasted. Linguistic ambiguity results from a multiplicity of semantic interpretations motivated by structural pattern. The meanings can be "translated" either by variations of the corresponding minimal strings or by specifying the type & extent of modification needed between the two interpretations. C. F. Hockett's (1972) translatability notion that a joke is linguistic if it cannot readily be translated into other languages without losing its humor is used to interpret some cross-linguistic jokes. It is claimed that additional intralinguistic criteria are needed to classify jokes. By using a syntactic representation, the humor can be explained & compared cross-linguistically. Since the mapping of semantic values onto lexical units is highly language specific, translatability is much less frequent with lexical ambiguity. Similarly, phonological jokes are not usually translatable. Pragmatic ambiguity can be translated on the basis of H. P. Grice's (1975) cooperative principle of conversation that calls for discourse interpretations. If the distinction between linguistic & nonlinguistic jokes is based on translatability, pragmatic jokes must be excluded from the classification. Because of their universality, pragmatic jokes should be included into the linguistic classification by going beyond the translatability criteria & using intralinguistic features to describe them.

Wykorzystanie Gramatyki Kognitywnej w klasie językowej: Nauczanie angielskich konstrukcji dzierżawczych, czasu i aspektu

Wydział Neofilologii: Instytut Filologii Angielskiej

Pozyskiwanie danych leksykalnych z tekstówelektronicznych (na materiale czasopisma naukowego)

Praca dotyczy wybranych metod pozyskiwania, czyli ekscerpcji, informacji o charakterze leksykalnym z elektronicznych zbiorów tekstów.Jej celem jest, po pierwsze, sformułowanie nowych, oryginalnych metod, które mogą być użyteczne w pozyskiwaniu materiału do analiz leksykalnych, a następnie zbadanie ich na wybranym zbiorze tekstów.Planowano opracowanie metod niewymagających zaawansowanej znajomości programowania komputerowego, a jednocześnie umożliwiających uzyskanie wartościowych wyników, gdzie za wartościowość metody uznaje się daną wydajność ekscerpcyjną. Trzy sformułowane metody dopracowano i zoptymalizowano.Metoda ekscerpcji jednostek nowych dostarczyła ponad 1000 wyrazów nowych, niezarejestrowanych, metoda ekscerpcji kolokacji w oparciu o akronimy daje ponad 6000 jednostek, zaś metoda ekscerpcji kolokacji wykorzystująca końcówkę liczby mnogiej dała ponad 110 tysięcy wyodrębnionych jednostek.

Edward Sapir’s View About International Auxiliary Language

The search for common attributes of all languages is connected with the search for characteristics which differentiate languages. If some attributes cannot be found in every language, what is cause of this situation? Is it linked up with the origin of language or with users of the language?

Integrative motivation and global language (English) acquisition in Poland

This study investigated the consistency of a measure of integrative motivation in the prediction of achievement in English as a foreign language in 18 samples of Polish school students. The results are shown to have implications for concerns expressed that integrative motivation might not be appropriate to the acquisition of English because it is a global language and moreover that other factors such as the gender of the student or the environment of the class might also influence its predictability. Results of a hierarchical linear modeling analysis indicated that for the older samples, integrative motivation was a consistent predictor of grades in English, unaffected by either the gender of the student or class environment acting as covariates. Comparable results were obtained for the younger samples except that student gender also contributed to the prediction of grades in English. Examination of the correlations of the elements of the integrative motivation score with English grades demonstrated that the aggregate score is the more consistent correlate from sample to sample than the elements themselves. Such results lead to the hypothesis that integrative motivation is a multi-dimensional construct and different aspects of the motivational complex come into play for each individual. That is, two individuals can hold the same level of integrative motivation and thus attain the same level of achievement but one might be higher in some elements and lower in others than another individual, resulting in consistent correlations of the aggregate but less so for the elements.

Gender-dependent language anxiety in Polish communication apprehensives

This paper analyzes the relationship between communication apprehension and language anxiety from the perspective of gender. As virtually no empirical studies have addressed the explicit influence of gender on language anxiety in communication apprehensives, this paper proposes that females are generally more sensitive to anxiety, as reflected in various spheres of communication. For this reason, language anxiety levels in communication apprehensive females should be higher, unlike those of communication apprehensive males. Comparisons between them were made using a student t test, two-way ANOVA, and post-hoc Tukey test. The results revealed that Polish communication apprehensive secondary grammar school males and females do not differ in their levels of language anxiety, although nonapprehensive males experience significantly lower language anxiety than their female peers. It is argued that the finding can be attributed to developmental patterns, gender socialization processes, classroom practices, and the uniqueness of the FL learning process, which is a stereotypically female domain.

Idiom processing in aphasic patients

The aim of the present paper is to provide insight into the issue of idiom comprehension in pa- tients who are in the process of recovery from the syndrome of aphasia. Research in figurative language comprehension has seen a robust development in the recent decades. However, it has not been until quite recently that psycholinguists began to delve into the aspect of metaphorical language comprehension in brain damaged populations. It was observed that even though the ability to produce and understand language is recovered in the majority of patients with head trauma, the impairment of some aspects of comprehension may protract. The understanding of idioms, metaphors, similes and proverbs, due to their specific, non-literal character, has been evi- denced to pose a serious problem to aphasic patients, as they fail to decipher the figurative mean- ing of the utterance, and, instead, tend to process the message literally (Papagno et al. 2004). In the present study, three patients who suffered from aphasic disorder were tested for com- prehension of idioms by means of two multiple choice tasks. The obtained results corroborated the hypothesis that patients who are in the process of recovery from aphasia encounter various pitfalls in the comprehension of idiomatic language. Predominantly, they exhibit an inclination to choose the erroneous, literal paraphrases of the presented idioms over their correct, idiomatic counterparts. The present paper aims at accounting for the reasons underlying such a tendency.

Świadomość językowa i stosunek do holenderskiej i belgijskiej odmiany języka niderlandzkiego wśród polskich studentów niderlandystki

Wydział Anglistyki

Zastosowanie podcastów w rozwijaniu sprawności słuchania ze zrozumieniem w języku obcym na przykładzie studentów germanistyki i lingwistyki stosowanej w Polsce

Wydział Neofilologii

James Evans : inventor of the syllabic system of the Cree language / by John McLean ... (Robin Rustler).

http://www.archive.org/details/jamesevans00maclrich

Program Representation Size in an Intermediate Language with Intersection and Union Types

The CIL compiler for core Standard ML compiles whole programs using a novel typed intermediate language (TIL) with intersection and union types and flow labels on both terms and types. The CIL term representation duplicates portions of the program where intersection types are introduced and union types are eliminated. This duplication makes it easier to represent type information and to introduce customized data representations. However, duplication incurs compile-time space costs that are potentially much greater than are incurred in TILs employing type-level abstraction or quantification. In this paper, we present empirical data on the compile-time space costs of using CIL as an intermediate language. The data shows that these costs can be made tractable by using sufficiently fine-grained flow analyses together with standard hash-consing techniques. The data also suggests that non-duplicating formulations of intersection (and union) types would not achieve significantly better space complexity.

Automatic Detection of Relevant Head Gestures in American Sign Language Communication

An automated system for detection of head movements is described. The goal is to label relevant head gestures in video of American Sign Language (ASL) communication. In the system, a 3D head tracker recovers head rotation and translation parameters from monocular video. Relevant head gestures are then detected by analyzing the length and frequency of the motion signal's peaks and valleys. Each parameter is analyzed independently, due to the fact that a number of relevant head movements in ASL are associated with major changes around one rotational axis. No explicit training of the system is necessary. Currently, the system can detect "head shakes." In experimental evaluation, classification performance is compared against ground-truth labels obtained from ASL linguists. Initial results are promising, as the system matches the linguists' labels in a significant number of cases.

An alignment based similarity measure for hand detection in cluttered sign language video

Locating hands in sign language video is challenging due to a number of factors. Hand appearance varies widely across signers due to anthropometric variations and varying levels of signer proficiency. Video can be captured under varying illumination, camera resolutions, and levels of scene clutter, e.g., high-res video captured in a studio vs. low-res video gathered by a web cam in a user’s home. Moreover, the signers’ clothing varies, e.g., skin-toned clothing vs. contrasting clothing, short-sleeved vs. long-sleeved shirts, etc. In this work, the hand detection problem is addressed in an appearance matching framework. The Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) based matching score function is reformulated to allow non-rigid alignment between pairs of images to account for hand shape variation. The resulting alignment score is used within a Support Vector Machine hand/not-hand classifier for hand detection. The new matching score function yields improved performance (in ROC area and hand detection rate) over the Vocabulary Guided Pyramid Match Kernel (VGPMK) and the traditional, rigid HOG distance on American Sign Language video gestured by expert signers. The proposed match score function is computationally less expensive (for training and testing), has fewer parameters and is less sensitive to parameter settings than VGPMK. The proposed detector works well on test sequences from an inexpert signer in a non-studio setting with cluttered background.

Cuckoo: a Language for Implementing Memory- and Thread-safe System Services

This paper is centered around the design of a thread- and memory-safe language, primarily for the compilation of application-specific services for extensible operating systems. We describe various issues that have influenced the design of our language, called Cuckoo, that guarantees safety of programs with potentially asynchronous flows of control. Comparisons are drawn between Cuckoo and related software safety techniques, including Cyclone and software-based fault isolation (SFI), and performance results suggest our prototype compiler is capable of generating safe code that executes with low runtime overheads, even without potential code optimizations. Compared to Cyclone, Cuckoo is able to safely guard accesses to memory when programs are multithreaded. Similarly, Cuckoo is capable of enforcing memory safety in situations that are potentially troublesome for techniques such as SFI.