Unilibrary. Oliy ta'lim muassasalarining yagona elektron kutubxona axborot tizimi.

English South African children’s literature and the environment

Historical studies of nature conservation and literary criticism of fiction concerned with the natural environment provide some pointers for the study of South African children’s literature in English. This kind of literature, in turn, has a contribution to make to studies of South African social history and literature. There are English-language stories, poems and picture books for children which reflect human interaction with nature in South Africa since early in the nineteenth century: from hunting, through domestication of the wilds, the development of scientific agriculture, and the changing roles of nature reserves, to modern ecological concern for the entire environment. Until late in the twentieth century the literature usually endorsed the assumption held by whites that they had exclusive ownership of the land and wildlife. In recent years English-language children’s writers and translators of indigenous folktales for children have begun to explore traditional beliefs about and practices in conservation.

Empirical Comparison of Evaluation Methods for Unsupervised Learning of Morphology

Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning of morphology provide practical solutions for processing morphologically rich languages with less human labor than the traditional rule-based analyzers. Direct evaluation of the learning methods using linguistic reference analyses is important for their development, as evaluation through the final applications is often time consuming. However, even linguistic evaluation is not straightforward for full morphological analysis, because the morpheme labels generated by the learning method can be arbitrary. We review the previous evaluation methods for the learning tasks and propose new variations. In order to compare the methods, we perform an extensive meta-evaluation using the large collection of results from the Morpho Challenge competitions.

El inglés, idioma internacional de la medicina. Causas y consecuencias de un fenómeno actual

Este artículo analiza el predominio histórico y actual del inglés como lengua franca en el ámbito de la medicina científica. El autor explora la transición histórica desde el griego y el latín hacia la fragmentación lingüística del siglo XIX y el posterior dominio absoluto del inglés tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Asimismo, examina cómo esta situación influye en la terminología y estructura gramatical de otros idiomas, particularmente en el español, abordando fenómenos como la adopción de anglicismos, la simplificación de la comunicación científica y los riesgos de imprecisión terminológica derivados del uso masivo del inglés en la literatura médica mundial.

Ehefrau Vreni haucht ihm ins Ohr... Untersuchung zur geschlechtergerechten Sprache und zur Darstellung von Frauen in Deutschschweizer Tageszeitungen

It will be discussed in what way the language of Swiss newspapers written in German is gender-sensitive and what types of sexism can be found still. Six randomly chosen articles from six issues of each the 'Tagesanzeiger', the 'NZZ' and the 'Blick' are analyzed. On the one hand, the usage of non-sexist alternatives to the generic masculinum is examined in respect to personal references and, on the other hand, it is shown how men and women are treated in linguistically different ways. The data proves that sexism has, to a large extent, disappeared from Swiss-German newspapers. Sexist thinking, however, is still present in the subconscious and also manifests itself in the texts of the newspapers.

Discourse Cohesion and Accessibility of Referents in Oral Narratives: A Comparison of L1 and L2 Acquisition of French and English

This study aims at comparing L1 and L2 acquisition processes through an analysis of the linguistic means used to ensure discourse cohesion in the oral narratives of French and English four-, seven- and ten-year-old children and of adult learners of these two languages. We focused on the use of high accessibility markers (HAM) (zero anaphora, subject and object pronouns) and low accessibility markers (LAM) (definite noun phrases) by the different groups of learners to analyze the way they maintained and switched reference to the protagonists of the story. Our results highlight a tendency to underspecification among children, who use HAM in a higher proportion than native adults and produce ambiguous forms in context; and a tendency to overspecification among adult advanced and intermediate L2 learners, who favour LAM even where pronouns could be envisaged. This might be explained by the impact of cognitive factors as well as crosslinguistic influences on the productions of L1 and L2 learners.

Differences in Attainment and Performance in a Foreign Language: The Role of Working Memory Capacity

The goal of this study is to investigate the role of working memory capacity in L2 attainment and performance. The study uses an L1 reading span task to measure working memory of a group of 59 high-intermediate/advanced learners of English, and a film retelling task to measure their oral production. The analysis first showed a moderate to high correlation between proficiency measured by a general proficiency test and learners’ fluency, lexical complexity, and accuracy but not structural complexity on the retelling task. Secondly, no correlation was found between overall proficiency and working memory. Thirdly, a weak correlation was found between fluency and lexical complexity, and working memory. When the group was split into top and bottom levels of proficiency, moderate correlations were found between lexical complexity and working memory only for the high-proficiency group. The results are discussed in the light of previous research.

Die Übersetzung des Historischen Lexikons der Schweiz: Ein Unternehmen von sprachpolitischer Bedeutung

Der Artikel befasst sich mit der Übersetzung des Historischen Lexikons der Schweiz und basiert auf den Erfahrungen von drei Mitarbeitern. Die Enzyklopädie wird simultan in den drei Amtssprachen Deutsch, Französisch und Italienisch sowie in einer Kurzversion auf Rätoromanisch veröffentlicht, was eine komplexe administrative Planung und terminologische Präzision erfordert. Der Beitrag beschreibt konkrete Probleme bei der Übersetzung historischer Texte, die über bloßes sprachliches Wissen hinaus fundierte Kenntnisse der Schweizer und europäischen Geschichte verlangen. Dabei wird die Bedeutung der Mehrsprachigkeit für die Schweizer Identität hervorgehoben, während auf den Verzicht von maschinellen Übersetzungsprogrammen zugunsten traditioneller Methoden hingewiesen wird.

Die Mundart von Bosco Gurin

Bosco Gurin, the highest village in the Swiss canton of Ticino, was settled before the first half of the thirteenth century from the Wallis. It is an independent community which has about 60-70 inhabitants. The Alemannic dialect spoken in the village, Gurinerdeutsch, has been investigated since the nineteenth century. This paper provides an overview of the village's external circumstances, its linguistic structure, including phonology and grammar, with particular emphasis on nouns and verbs.

Dialekt/ologie an der Jahrtausendwende: Die neuen dialektologischen Wenden

Dieser Artikel dient als Vorwort zur Ausgabe der Zeitschrift Linguistik online und reflektiert die Ergebnisse des Hauptseminars "Dialekt und Dialektologie an der Jahrtausendwende". Der Text beleuchtet die aktuelle Lage der Dialektologie als Forschungsfeld, die Bedeutung neuer technischer Methoden für die Analyse syntaktischer und prosodischer Phänomene sowie das Zusammenspiel von dialektalen Varietäten und Standardsprache. Es werden verschiedene aktuelle Forschungsprojekte vorgestellt, die sich mit der räumlichen Dimension sprachlicher Ausprägungen befassen, und die Entwicklung hin zu einer syntaktischen und prosodischen Wende innerhalb der Disziplin diskutiert.

Das generische Maskulinum im Deutschen: Ein historischer Spaziergang durch die deutsche Grammatikschreibung von der Renaissance bis zur Postmoderne

The article examines the evolution of the "generic masculine" in the German language as reflected in grammars from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It explores how grammarians historically treated masculine personal nouns and their ability to refer to both sexes, contrasting this with modern discussions and feminist linguistic critique. The author traces the development of grammatical norms, the role of gender in language, and the historical lack of explicit normative attempts to enforce the generic masculine in German compared to the English experience, providing a detailed historical perspective on linguistic and social structures.

Education Yesterday, Education Tomorrow

This volume of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, presents a collection of essays focused on the critical examination of the American educational system. Contributors explore the history, current state, and future prospects of education, addressing themes of educational reform, policy challenges, school performance, and the transformative power of learning in the knowledge era. The articles offer diverse perspectives from experts in various fields to analyze the complexities and necessary changes within educational institutions, providing insights into both systemic flaws and potential pathways for sustainable improvement and innovation.

Cultural Nationalism and the Irish Literary Revival

The article explores the impact of cultural nationalism on the Irish Literary Revival, revisiting familiar themes in the light of contemporary theories of nationalism and testing their validity in the Irish context. The author examines the interplay between political and cultural identity, analyzing the work of influential writers such as Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, and Beckett. It delves into the historical encounter between Britain and Ireland, the construction of Irishness, and how twentieth-century Irish writers engaged with concepts of nationhood, distinctiveness, and resistance against the backdrop of a changing political landscape and the aftermath of colonial influence.

Cross-linguistic evidence and the licensing of implicit arguments

This paper discusses the occurrence and the licensing of implicit object arguments, also referred to as null complements or understood arguments. The authors argue against purely functionalist accounts that rely exclusively on general pragmatic principles, suggesting that these are insufficient to explain the phenomenon. They propose a two-stage model consisting of a lexical-syntactic and an interpretational-pragmatic component, and emphasize the importance of cross-linguistic data in developing a satisfactory theory. The paper also reviews Fillmore's lexical-syntactic approach and his classification of indefinite and definite null complements, while applying these concepts to various examples.

Corpora and historical linguistics

The article aims to survey and assess the current state of electronic historical corpora and corpus methodology, while exploring possible future developments. It highlights the emergence of historical corpus linguistics as a vibrant field that has significantly enhanced the study of language history and change. The text discusses the transition from pre-electronic to electronic corpus-based research, the rationale behind the corpus linguistic approach, and the importance of stratified, balanced corpora. It also addresses the role of electronic resources in facilitating the empirical study of language variation and change, offering insights into systematic analysis and the integration of language-theoretical considerations in modern linguistic research.

Constitución de un corpus de semántica verbal del español. Metodología de anotación de núcleos argumentales

El presente artículo detalla la metodología y el desarrollo del proyecto de desambiguación semántica de los núcleos argumentales de SenSem, un corpus equilibrado constituido por 100 oraciones para cada uno de los 250 verbos más frecuentes del español. El resultado, unido a desarrollos anteriores del proyecto, es un corpus ricamente etiquetado con información sintáctica y semántica, conectado a una base de datos que recoge la información pertinente para cada sentido verbal, por lo que el recurso resultante es adecuado para estudios empíricos centrados en el verbo. Se presenta asimismo un análisis crítico de WordNet 1.6 del español como recurso de anotación lexico-semántica de corpus y una guía de criterios de anotación, ambos de utilidad para tareas similares de etiquetado con WordNet.

Computer-Assisted Language Learning and the Revolution in Computational Linguistics

This article examines the historical relationship between Computational Linguistics (CL) and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), arguing that for a long period they developed independently due to CL's preoccupation with Natural Language Understanding (NLU). The author explores how the 1990s crisis in NLU-oriented approaches led to a more problem-oriented paradigm, creating new opportunities for integration between the fields and demonstrating why recent revolutions in CL offer promising perspectives for the future of CALL.