Semantic change

[ES] En este trabajo se define el cambio semántico, se analizan las causas de que se produzca y se especifican sus tipos en el griego antiguo.

Semantic change and intersubjectification: The origin of reprise evidential conditional in Old Catalan

The reprise evidential conditional (REC) is nowadays not very usual in Catalan: it is restricted to journalistic language and to some very formal genres (such as academic or legal language), it is not present in spontaneous discourse. On the one hand, it has been described among the rather new modality values of the conditional. On the other, the normative tradition tended to reject it for being a gallicism, or to describe it as an unsuitable neologism. Thanks to the extraction from text corpora, we surprisingly find this REC in Catalan from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the contemporary age, with semantic and pragmatic nuances and different evidence of grammaticalization. Due to the current interest in evidentiality, the REC has been widely studied in French, Italian and Portuguese, focusing mainly on its contemporary uses and not so intensively on the diachronic process that could explain the origin of this value. In line with this research, that we initiated studying the epistemic and evidential future in Catalan, our aim is to describe: a) the pragmatic context that could have been the initial point of the REC in the thirteenth century, before we find indisputable attestations of this use; b) the path of semantic change followed by the conditional from a ‘future in the past’ tense to the acquisition of epistemic and evidential values; and c) the role played by invited inferences, subjectification and intersubjectification in this change.

Semantic change

Presentation of the volume.

Mudança linguística em português: aspectos sociolinguísticos da neologia

Neste estudo, proponho-me reflectir sobre o conceito de neologismo, com vista a analisar o contributo deste fenómeno para a mudança linguística do português. Discutirei a relevância de alguns dos critérios propostos por Cabré (1993) e pela Rede Panlatina de Terminologia para a identificação do fenómeno neológico, sustentandome na observação de dados linguísticos relacionados com o domínio da aprendizagem electrónica. É meu propósito ponderar as motivações sociolinguísticas da neologia e analisar possíveis implicações deste processo de criação lexical no tecido linguístico português contemporâneo e no contexto educativo do ensino superior.

A gramaticalização da conjunção concessiva embora

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

Gramaticalização de juntivos adversativos na história do português

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

La integració conceptual o blending i l’arc de Sant Martí: vers una semàntica cognitiva diacrònica i cultural

Aquest article fa un estudi onomasiològic de les denominacions de l’arc de Sant Martí en una perspectiva diacrònica, de contacte de llengües (català, occità, aragonès, etc.) i segons la teoria de la integració conceptual o blending. Planteja la necessitat que la semàntica diacrònica cognitiva faça pròpia l’orientació cultural (fonamentalment, antropològica, històrica social i cultural) i semiòtica.

Diacronia i neologia: canvi semàntic, subjectivació i representació del pensament. El català esmar, des de ‘taxar’ fins a ‘inferir’ i ‘imaginar’ i més enllà

L’estudi de la neologia és indestriable de l’estudi del canvi lingüístic i, doncs, de la diacronia. Ens proposem ací descriure el procés de canvi semàntic que va experimentar el verb esmar, forma patrimonial del llatí *adaestimare, paral·lela del cultisme estimar. Aquesta recerca es fonamenta en l’aprofitament dels corpus textuals i altres materials despullats manualment. Sobre aquests materials, s’ha assajat l’anàlisi de la subjectivació i de les inferències que proposa la teoria de la inferència invitada del canvi semàntic (= TIICS).

De l’expressió de la percepció sensorial auditiva a l’expressió del discurs reportat. El verb sentir en català medieval (s. XIII–XVI)

This study analyzes the process of semantic change by which the Old Catalan verb sentir developed from a meaning based on general perception to one implying auditory perception. In particular, the article shows that by the end of the 13th century the verb sentir had only semanticized the perception of non-linguistic auditory stimuli and had not fused completely with the meaning of the verb oir, as was the case with the evolution of SĔNTĪRE in other Romance languages (such as Peninsular Spanish). Our study has been based on data analysis of an electronic linguistic corpus using the concepts of E. C. Traugott’s Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) (2012) and the concept of evidentiality.

A correlação locução adjetiva/adjetivo: uma análise funcional

This research deals with the relationship locução adjetiva / adjective, focusing the reasons for using one form or the other one, in situations where the speaker has a choice between an adjective or a locução adjetiva virtually correspondent and vice versa. In general, the objective is to investigate the possibility of correlation between locução adjetiva and adjective, and to identify motivations for the use of one form or the other one. The theoretical support of this paper is the Linguística Funcional Centrada no Uso (LFCU), which groups together theoretical and methodological assumptions of North American Functional Linguistics, represented by authors as Givón (1984), Bybee (2010), Traugott (2011), and Cognitive Linguistics, as developed by Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1987) and Lakoff and Johnson (2002). As regards the methodological procedures, this research is of qualitative and quantitative character: at first, we did the survey data in the texts that made up the corpus, followed by analysis of each them, especially the locução adjetiva, by considering the semantic, morphosyntactic, cognitive and pragmatic aspects. The corpus is composed of 36 texts, taken from 12 issues of the Veja magazine, published between January 2013 and March 2013. As for the results, in the case of locução adjetiva with related adjectives, this research has shown that the choice of former is due to semantic change, the use of lexicalized forms, to priming cases or to stylistic motivations. It means that the choices of one of these two forms go beyond lexical issues, since there are other motivations, such as syntactic, semantic and pragmatic ones.

Bruch und Kontinuität. Zum Modernisierungseffekt der Reformpädagogik

Untersucht wird die Frage, ob, und wenn ja, in welchem Sinne die internationale Reformpädagogik nach 1890 eine neue Ära gewesen ist. Anhand einer vergleichenden Literaturanalyse werden zunächst die Modernisierungsbehauptungen verschiedener reformpädagogischer Autoren nachgewiesen, bevor dann die Kontinuierung der Tradition beschrieben und am Schluß die typische reformpädagogische Semantik mit tatsächlichen Modernisierungseffekten im Bildungssystem zusammengebracht wird. Die These definiert einen paradoxen Tatbestand: Sehr traditionelle Motive und Denkbilder der Pädagogik des 19. Jahrhunderts werden in theoretisch wie empirisch neue Kontexte urbaner Großstadterfahrung übersetzt, ohne ihre reformprägende Kraft zu verlieren. (DIPF/Orig.)

Semantic Equivalence of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the "Body Change Inventory"

With the increase in research on the components of Body Image, validated instruments are needed to evaluate its dimensions. The Body Change Inventory (BCI) assesses strategies used to alter body size among adolescents. The scope of this study was to describe the translation and evaluation for semantic equivalence of the BCI in the Portuguese language. The process involved the steps of (1) translation of the questionnaire to the Portuguese language; (2) back-translation to English; (3) evaluation of semantic equivalence; and (4) assessment of comprehension by professional experts and the target population. The six subscales of the instrument were translated into the Portuguese language. Language adaptations were made to render the instrument suitable for the Brazilian reality. The questions were interpreted as easily understandable by both experts and young people. The Body Change Inventory has been translated and adapted into Portuguese. Evaluation of the operational, measurement and functional equivalence are still needed.

Semantic modeling method for configurable enterprise information systems

Business practices vary from one company to another and business practices often need to be changed due to changes of business environments. To satisfy different business practices, enterprise systems need to be customized. To keep up with ongoing business practice changes, enterprise systems need to be adapted. Because of rigidity and complexity, the customization and adaption of enterprise systems often takes excessive time with potential failures and budget shortfall. Moreover, enterprise systems often drag business behind because they cannot be rapidly adapted to support business practice changes. Extensive literature has addressed this issue by identifying success or failure factors, implementation approaches, and project management strategies. Those efforts were aimed at learning lessons from post implementation experiences to help future projects. This research looks into this issue from a different angle. It attempts to address this issue by delivering a systematic method for developing flexible enterprise systems which can be easily tailored for different business practices or rapidly adapted when business practices change. First, this research examines the role of system models in the context of enterprise system development; and the relationship of system models with software programs in the contexts of computer aided software engineering (CASE), model driven architecture (MDA) and workflow management system (WfMS). Then, by applying the analogical reasoning method, this research initiates a concept of model driven enterprise systems. The novelty of model driven enterprise systems is that it extracts system models from software programs and makes system models able to stay independent of software programs. In the paradigm of model driven enterprise systems, system models act as instructors to guide and control the behavior of software programs. Software programs function by interpreting instructions in system models. This mechanism exposes the opportunity to tailor such a system by changing system models. To make this true, system models should be represented in a language which can be easily understood by human beings and can also be effectively interpreted by computers. In this research, various semantic representations are investigated to support model driven enterprise systems. The significance of this research is 1) the transplantation of the successful structure for flexibility in modern machines and WfMS to enterprise systems; and 2) the advancement of MDA by extending the role of system models from guiding system development to controlling system behaviors. This research contributes to the area relevant to enterprise systems from three perspectives: 1) a new paradigm of enterprise systems, in which enterprise systems consist of two essential elements: system models and software programs. These two elements are loosely coupled and can exist independently; 2) semantic representations, which can effectively represent business entities, entity relationships, business logic and information processing logic in a semantic manner. Semantic representations are the key enabling techniques of model driven enterprise systems; and 3) a brand new role of system models; traditionally the role of system models is to guide developers to write system source code. This research promotes the role of system models to control the behaviors of enterprise.

Semantic Classes in Topic Detection and Tracking

Topic detection and tracking (TDT) is an area of information retrieval research the focus of which revolves around news events. The problems TDT deals with relate to segmenting news text into cohesive stories, detecting something new, previously unreported, tracking the development of a previously reported event, and grouping together news that discuss the same event. The performance of the traditional information retrieval techniques based on full-text similarity has remained inadequate for online production systems. It has been difficult to make the distinction between same and similar events. In this work, we explore ways of representing and comparing news documents in order to detect new events and track their development. First, however, we put forward a conceptual analysis of the notions of topic and event. The purpose is to clarify the terminology and align it with the process of news-making and the tradition of story-telling. Second, we present a framework for document similarity that is based on semantic classes, i.e., groups of words with similar meaning. We adopt people, organizations, and locations as semantic classes in addition to general terms. As each semantic class can be assigned its own similarity measure, document similarity can make use of ontologies, e.g., geographical taxonomies. The documents are compared class-wise, and the outcome is a weighted combination of class-wise similarities. Third, we incorporate temporal information into document similarity. We formalize the natural language temporal expressions occurring in the text, and use them to anchor the rest of the terms onto the time-line. Upon comparing documents for event-based similarity, we look not only at matching terms, but also how near their anchors are on the time-line. Fourth, we experiment with an adaptive variant of the semantic class similarity system. The news reflect changes in the real world, and in order to keep up, the system has to change its behavior based on the contents of the news stream. We put forward two strategies for rebuilding the topic representations and report experiment results. We run experiments with three annotated TDT corpora. The use of semantic classes increased the effectiveness of topic tracking by 10-30\% depending on the experimental setup. The gain in spotting new events remained lower, around 3-4\%. The anchoring the text to a time-line based on the temporal expressions gave a further 10\% increase the effectiveness of topic tracking. The gains in detecting new events, again, remained smaller. The adaptive systems did not improve the tracking results.

Towards web-based semantic enrichment of 3D insects

Natural history collections are an invaluable resource housing a wealth of knowledge with a long tradition of contributing to a wide range of fields such as taxonomy, quarantine, conservation and climate change. It is recognized however [Smith and Blagoderov 2012] that such physical collections are often heavily underutilized as a result of the practical issues of accessibility. The digitization of these collections is a step towards removing these access issues, but other hurdles must be addressed before we truly unlock the potential of this knowledge.