Language Communication

This article builds on literature on language and positionality to explore the role of voicing in the way individuals configure social differences. Drawing on research during the last phase of the Sri Lankan civil war, I examine how a Muslim family employs voicing to evaluate other individuals and ethnic groups in a way that pertains to morality and responsibility. I suggest that in an atmosphere of enshrouding fear, responsibility is not only an issue in terms of people's accountability for what they say and do but is also central in the way people situate themselves in relation to others.

The article explores the shift from classical binary logic (true and false) to a more complex landscape of logical frameworks. It introduces logical pluralism, which suggests that no single, universally accepted system of logic exists. The paper connects this idea to neutrosophy, a framework that extends fuzzy logic by incorporating a third value: indeterminacy. This triadic approach, where every proposition has a degree of truth (T), falsity (F), and indeterminacy (I), is particularly useful for managing incomplete or contradictory information. The author argues that different logical systems, like different tools, are suited for different problems, and that the search for a single "one true logic" is less important than recognizing the diverse tools available for navigating the complexities of reasoning.

Previous research The first publication in which aspects of plural formation in VGT were explored, was written by Van Herreweghe (1995). Vermeerbergen (1997) also discussed certain aspects of plural formation in VGT. These studies found certain mechanisms for plural formation, i.e.: (1) the repetition of (a movement of) a sign; (2) the use of numbers; (3) the use of quantifiers; (4) the use of classifiers and (5) double articulation. However, these studies do not present a detailed description of each mechanism and they do not discuss which (types of) signs get which plural form. Moreover, they are not based on an analysis of extensive corpus data. Research questions It was therefore considered necessary to set up a more detailed research project analysing a larger, but targeted, corpus. The following research questions were defined: 1. Which are the possible forms of plural formation of noun signs in VGT? 2. Is there a one-toone relation between singular and plural forms of noun signs and/or do particular noun signs have different possible plurals? 3. If a singular noun can take various forms of pluralisation, which form is the preferred one in which context? 4. Are certain plural forms obligatory in certain contexts? Research methodology Plural formation has been dealt with in detail in a number of other sign languages, i.e. in German Sign Language (DGS) by Pfau & Steinbach (2006), in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) by Nijhoff & Zwitserlood (1999) and Harder, Koolhof & Schermer (2003) and in Turkish Sign Language (TID) by Kubuș (2008). Based on these studies we developed our methodology and decided to work with elicitation materials consisting of pictures and videos without any interference of a spoken or written language. In total, 39 objects were selected and for each object four pictures were shown to the informants, bringing the total to 156 pictures in which: -one object is displayed -two objects are displayed -a countable number of objects is displayed -an non-countable number of objects is displayed Three of the objects in the pictures were also elicited by means of films as we wanted to elicit data by means of both static and dynamic materials. The informants had to meet as many of the following criteria as possible: -early acquisition of VGT -education in a deaf school (at least at primary school level) -daily usage of VGT (e.g. with parents, with partner, in the family, at work) -active membership of the Flemish Deaf community. All data collection, i.e. the recordings, was conducted by a deaf researcher. Results and discussion At the moment, data of three signers from each of the five Flemish provinces have been analysed. This has yielded the following (preliminary) results. Plural formation can clearly be expressed in different ways: 1. The citation form of the sign is changed so as to express plurality: a. By changing the manual part of the sign i. by means of double articulation (i.e. a one-handed sign is produced with both hands) ii. by means of reduplication (i.e. the sign or the movement component of the sign is produced more than once) b. By changing the non-manual part of the sign (mostly the spoken component which then refers to the plural form of the corresponding spoken Dutch word); 2. A sign is added (in various possible orders to be discussed during the paper presentation), i.e. a. A lexical sign from the established VGT lexicon i. A number (TWO, THREE, etc) e.g. TWO FLOWER IN VASE ii. Another quantifier (MANY, SOME, etc.) e.g. MANY BICYCLE STAY STATION TO-PARK IN STATION iii. A collective sign (e.g. GROUP, ROW, etc.) e.g. FAR GROUP BIRD FLY b. A non-established sign from the productive lexicon i. A classifier construction (entity and handling classifiers) e.g. ON TABLE PLATE "platesin-a-mess-on-table" ii. A non-established collective sign e.g. STONE "pile" c. Pointing signs e.g. COW INDEX "there"++++ 3. Certain signs have plural meaning i. The default meaning is plural and morphologically the sign goes back to the repetition of the related singular sign. e.g. CHILDREN, PEOPLE, CLOTHES, FORREST etc. ii. The default meaning is plural e.g. CHIPS Besides these there also seem to be certain implicit mechanisms to express plurality. Moreover, usually the above-mentioned mechanisms were combined according to certain tendencies. Examples will be provided during the paper presentation.

Harder, Rita, Koolhof, Corline & Schermer, Trude. 2003. Meervoud in de NGT. Verslag van een onderzoek in het kader van OCW subsidie 2003. NederlandsGebarencentrum. Heyerick, Isabelle, Van Braeckevelt, Mieke, De Weerdt, Danny, Van Herreweghe, Mieke & Vermeerbergen, Myriam. 2009. Plural Formation in Flemish Sign language. Vlaams GebarentaalCentrum vzw. (unpublished) Kubuș, Okan. 2008. An Analysis of Turkish Sign Language (TID) Phonology and Morphology. Mastersverhandeling, Middle East Technical University. Pfau, Roland & Steinbach, Markus. 2006. Pluralization in Sign and Speech: A Cross-Modal Typological Study. In Linguistic Typology 10: 135 – 182. Van Herreweghe, Mieke. 1995. De Vlaams-Belgische Gebarentaal: een Eerste Verkenning. Gent: Academia Press. Vermeerbergen, Myriam. 1997. Grammaticale Aspecten van de Vlaams-Belgische Gebarentaal. Gentbrugge: Cultuur voor Doven. Zwitserlood, Inge & Nijhof, Sibylla. 1999. Pluralization in Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT). In Don, Jan / S...

The analysis shows that Flemish Sign Language can express existence by means of 1) the sign HAVE, 2) a Verb Construction 3) a localized lexical sign, 4) pointing, or 5) a combination of the above ways. In general, existential constructions in Flemish Sign Language have the ...

Though gestures can convey the meaning of the message and the thoughts of the speakers, there are limited research studies on how co-speech gestures are used in presenting engineering-related messages. This case study aims to understand how four types of gestures (beat, deictic, iconic, and metaphoric) are used in engineering proposal presentations to convey technical solutions in proposed products. This study employed a mixed-method research approach of using both multimodal discourse analysis and quantitative analysis to examine the ways two student presenters used co-speech gestures to communicate technical solutions in engineering proposal presentations. The findings showed that iconic gestures were used most frequently by one presenter to mimic the visual representations of designs and processes in engineering systems, co-occurring with spoken language to reinforce the propositional content. Deictic gestures were used most frequently by another presenter in directing the audience's attention to visual figures to facilitate the explanation of technical content. In comparison, beat and metaphoric gestures were used less frequently. This case study informs multimodal research on ESP spoken discourse and provides pedagogical implications for the application of gestures to facilitate the communication of technical content and concepts in engineering presentations.

We report a single case analysis of a recorded emergency call with particular reference to the use of the non-recognitional categorical person reference ‘a personal doctor’ in the sequential context created by the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) protocol routinely used by the emergency services. We describe both the position and the composition of the turn in which this categorical person reference is deployed in order to analyse the action accomplished by its selection. We show how this category reference is selected to support the action in which the speaker is otherwise engaged, which is to resist the sequential trajectory proposed by his interlocutor (giving instructions for cardiopulmonary resuscitation). Our analysis makes two key contributions: 1) it provides a concrete detailed exemplar of how analysts can ground claims about category-bound inferences in the empirical practices of talk in interaction and 2) it extends existing work on emergency calls by relating thei...

a spirit, or collective of "evolved" spirits. According to his children, Claudio Agramonte had been a rebellious and undisciplined young man who was fond of drinking. One day, he was visited by the spirits of two slaves, Rafael and Francisco Alava. Claudio walked into his rented room once to %nd an old, Black man who told him he was there to help him with his "labor" and with his development-Francisco. And for a while, through spiritual forms of inspiration, Claudio began to live the life of Rafael, the spirit who helped him most in his "humanitarian help"; to the point that it was not de%nable where one ended and the other began. But it was from a being considered an "educated" Spanish-Cuban spirit, José de Luz, that Claudio produced a series of small books, which form the core of this Society's doctrine. Claudio did this through automatic writing, or psychography, common to many Spiritist societies in the Caribbean. José de Luz, a lawyer and man of science, dictated to him from the beyond the "theory of psychic corpuscles, " a theory in which physical forms of trauma alter the functioning of someone's body and mind. A spirit impacts a living person through the passing on of their corpuscles. e second observation is that, for the Sociedad, just as for the wider Spiritist community in Cuba, people are born with a set of spirit guides, a cordón de muertos, each of which, while embodying Cuba's national archetypes (of the slave, or the native "Indian, " or the Arab, or the European priest), comes with a life, sometimes multiple lives, and its own traumas, which must be simultaneously harnessed and forgotten for a person's mediumship to be successful.

This article investigates the impact that opposing scale-making projects of boundary maintenance have on multilingual histories of indigenous Quechua and Aymara speakers in Puno, Peru. Quechua and Aymara speakers perpetuate discourses of strict ethnolinguistic difference, which correspond to scale-making projects that regiment ethnolinguistic boundaries and erase histories of indigenous multilingualism. These projects are challenged by opposing scalar projects that promote a common indigenous heritage. I will examine how indigenous puneños regiment ethnolinguistic boundaries through three case studies: inter-indigenous marriage, indigenous language radio programming, and a language revitalization program. In each site, puneños work to maintain ethnolinguistic boundaries, but are simultaneously confronted with scalar projects that attempts to reconfigure Quechua-Aymara multilingualism in the past, present, and imagined future.

Hesitations are pauses with different lengths, which are not generally left unfilled. They occur when the speaker is at a loss for words or engages in cognitive or verbal planning. Hesitation strategies belong to the larger class of ‘disfluencies’ or ‘self-repairs’. The objectives of this article are, firstly, to identify the hesitation strategies used by FL (Foreign Language) learners when participating in an interview and, secondly, to identify the distribution of hesitation occurrences during a discourse. This study presents an investigation of hesitation strategies among fifteen international students from one of the public universities in Malaysia. Video and audio recording were used for all participants during the interview. Two standard interviews were prepared for each participant. The interviewer asked a few questions about two specific topics from each participant. Concentrating on hesitations, DF (Disfluency) and pauses, and idiosyncratic fillers, the interviews were tran...

This paper examines factors complicating the definition of Standard Chinese, including register and socio-geographical variation, sound change and folk etymology, foreign loans and contact-induced structural change, and inherent imprecisions in the national spelling system. Also examined are reactions to change in the linguistic and language-teaching communities, how lay and academic attitudes towards impurities and linguistic innovation differ, and how differences between Chinese and western notions of 'language' and 'dialect' serve to further widen the gap between the textbook standard and perceived standardness. Predictions are made regarding the future development of Modern Standard Chinese that take into consideration the popular appeal of the language of westernized Chinese societies (e.g., Hong Kong and Taiwan) and the effect of the growth of native speakers of Mandarin in the Chinese-speaking world.

This paper examines factors complicating the definition of Standard Chinese, including register and socio-geographical variation, sound change and folk etymology, foreign loans and contact-induced structural change, and inherent imprecisions in the national spelling system. Also examined are reactions to change in the linguistic and language-teaching communities, how lay and academic attitudes towards impurities and linguistic innovation differ, and how differences between Chinese and western notions of 'language' and 'dialect' serve to further widen the gap between the textbook standard and perceived standardness. Predictions are made regarding the future development of Modern Standard Chinese that take into consideration the popular appeal of the language of westernized Chinese societies (e.g., Hong Kong and Taiwan) and the effect of the growth of native speakers of Mandarin in the Chinese-speaking world.

The letter by Bergpórsdóttir and Ingham critically reviews the design and results of the RESTART-study, our randomized trial into the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of two treatments for early stuttering in which nearly 200 children participated. The authors put three arguments forward to allege that we have not shown that the Lidcombe Program (LP) or the RESTART-DCM based treatment is more (cost-)effective than no treatment. They conclude that, based on their arguments, our results "have no value for clinical management" (see Bergpórsdóttir & Ingham, abstract). We would like to respond to what we perceive to be an inappropriate and incorrect conclusion. In fact, the RESTART-study was designed to meet the increased clinical demand for more studies in the field of developmental stuttering in order to enhance clinical care and strengthen the position of SLPs in reimbursement decision making. We will review the three arguments of Bergpórsdóttir and Ingham below. With regard to their primary argument, the lack of a non-treatment control group, the authors are right that we cannot convincingly show that one of either treatments shows better results compared to no treatment. This was, however, not the goal of our study. First, the term "control group" is somewhat ambiguous. It may stand for a) a placebo group (which is not a real option in stuttering research); b) a group without any treatment; and c) a group treated with another treatment. In our design we applied the third scenario. That is, we compared a relatively new treatment (the Lidcombe Program) to DCM based treatment, which is the standard treatment for young children who stutter in most countries in the world. Comparison of these treatments is highly relevant for both policy-makers as well as clinicians, as it

This article revisits the notion of indirect speech acts (ISA) in the light of a weak formulation of the classical Literal Force Hypothesis . It is argued that ISAs are actually instances of unspecified illocutions, which allows for the positing of a conventionalization cline in their realization. Under these assumptions, we revise current theories of ISAs and make a number of proposals to overcome their limitations: (1) (Multiple source)-in-target metonymies and illocutionary ICMs are postulated to account for the motivation and rich conceptual fabric of illocutionary categories, respectively; and (2) a more flexible model of illocutionary construction s is sketched in terms of base configurations and specification links in order to explain the multi-faceted nature of illocutionary performance.

In the majority of medical schools worldwide, English is used as the language of instruction. In contexts where English is a second or foreign language, medical students face the challenge of having to learn skills and subject matter required in their field in a language they may be unfamiliar with. For English language support provided to students to be effective, development of language programs must be informed by an assessment of students’ needs. The current literature shows that systematic analyses of students’ needs as a basis for developing English for medical studies programs are rarely conducted, and there is often a mismatch between the needs of students and the English courses offered. To obtain targeted information about students’ language needs for program development, input from the main stakeholders, medical students and medical teachers, is crucial. In this article, we report the results of an English language needs analysis conducted at a medical school in Malaysia ...

In April 2009, reports of a new strain of a deadly flu virus emerged in Mexico. The scarcity of information available on this new threat can be observed clearly in the language used in the news reports. This study investigates the use of conceptual metaphors of the Influenza A (H1N1) pandemic in the newspaper and how these metaphors helped to construct the notion of a pandemic in the media. Metaphors of illness and disease are a prominent tool in the discourse of disease in the news. The conceptual metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) was utilized as a framework in this study to investigate the coverage of the pandemic in the newspaper. The data was extracted from a corpus of news reports from The New Straits Times Malaysia from April 2009 to August 31, 2009 when the disease was at its peak. The results of the study yielded various metaphorical linguistic expression of war and construction of the pandemic in the news. Metaphors of war were found to be prominent, and it had a...

The Stillborn (1984) is Zaynab Alkali’s debut novel that captured the attention of many researchers and critics alike. The Virtuous Woman (1986) that arrived two years after has not attracted much critical attention. Alkali is a prominent Nigerian female writer, whose concern is always the place of a girl-child in a patriarchal African society. Literary reviews on the texts have highlighted concept of women oppression and their emancipation (Okereke, 1996, Razinatu and Kurfi, 2011). Alkali believes that, it is only education that can play the role of emancipation of a girl-child in a patriarchal society. In The Stillborn and The Virtuous Woman, Alkali attempts to prove this by portraying a female character (Li) in The Stillborn who triumphs at the end both educationally and economically. And in The Virtuous Woman three female characters are portrayed as successful ones educationally. But in so doing, Alkali seems to alienate the male characters in the two texts. The objective of thi...

This topic describes language complexities due to influences of disruptive innovations and impacts linguistics in structures and functions of changing language. As a result, their trends disturb societal language because of a battle between human intelligence and artificial intelligence to find out a solution for a society and culture through posthumanism language. The implications of AIdriven algorithmic innovations are leading to transcribe amongst non-verbal language, verbal language, and semantic communication across languages at prompt.

Discourse analysis (DA) or discourse studies , is an approach to the analysis of written spoken or signal language, which includes any massive semiotic occasion. And this is very important in language learning and analysis. The analysis of written and spoken language is an essential thing in the field of linguistics. The following article provides important information about discourse analysis.

Do people adjust their conversational strategies to the specific contextual demands of a given situation? Prior studies have yielded conflicting results, making it unclear how strategies vary with demands. We combine insights from qualitative and quantitative approaches in a within-participant experimental design involving two different contexts: spontaneously occurring conversations (SOC) and task-oriented conversations (TOC). We systematically assess backchanneling, otherinitiated repair and linguistic alignment. We find that SOC exhibit a higher number of backchannels, a reduced and more generic repair format and higher rates of lexical and syntactic alignment. TOC are characterized by a high number of specific repairs and a lower rate of lexical and syntactic alignment. However, when alignment occurs, more linguistic forms are aligned. The findings show that conversational strategies adapt to contextual demands.

According to the standard approach in cognitive linguistics, metonymy is a pervasive and powerful conceptual mechanism, a mapping of knowledge from a source domain to a target domain. In metonymy, the source concept serves as a reference point for attaining the intended target. Brone and Feyaerts (2003: 23) show that reference point reasoning consists of focusing on a salient, easily coded element (the reference point) in order to establish mental access to another, less salient conceptual entity (the target) which is generally harder to code. As has been shown in cognitive linguistics literature, universal human knowledge and bodily-grounded knowledge are essential for the interpretation of metonymy. However, there are some cases that are much less discussed; these are metonymies where the source concept encodes cultural knowledge that is crucial for the interpretation of the metonymic process. Such cases may require an increased cognitive effort and, if the interlocutor does not p...

Taylor (1992, 1997) argues that academic theories about language and communication are preceded and informed by lay metadiscourse, whether through adoption of or reactions to it. Similarly, see also Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, chapter 3; cf. Krippendorff, 1993a) suggests that most academic theories about communication (and Shannon and Weaver's in particular) are rooted in a lay theory of communication implied by a dead metadiscursive metaphor about communication -that is, a metaphor that may be far from adequate, but whose shortcomings and responsibility for ill research effects nevertheless largely escape notice because its continuous conventional use has deadened our ears to the fact that it is but an untested metaphor. Thus, Reddy demonstrates the truth of a passage from Wittgenstein that Taylor (1992, p. 233) cites: 'A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.' Thereby, Reddy also supplies a further reason for the 'rhetorical power' of the commonsensical theory that Taylor (1992) notes. Further, the commonsense theory of communication that Reddy shows to be underlying our metaphorical metadiscursive picture of communication betrays the telementational fallacy that Taylor (1992( , 1997( ), following Harris (1981)), indicates is at the root of the academic theories he examines. However, suggests that the acceptance of this commonsensical theory might at least sometimes be much less deliberate than seems the case with those

This paper centers on the analysis of an AI-generated conversation created using Google’s GEMMA Language Model. Notebook LM, an advanced generative AI tool, allows the synthesis of ideas and generates dialogue based on multiple source texts. The conversation was crafted as a synthetic interaction between virtual entities, designed to represent key arguments and insights from three academic articles spanning distinct fields: computer science, philosophy, and pharmacology.
Each article was selected to reflect unique disciplinary perspectives, stylistic differences, and thematic relevance to the integration of Artificial Intelligence in diverse areas of study. The first article, Schneider (2021), addresses AI’s role in language technologies, particularly its impact on language diversity and linguistic hierarchies. The second article, Coffin (2021), delves into the philosophical notion of the “machinic unconscious,” exploring how environmental and technological systems shape subconscious influences. Finally, the seminal paper by Lowry et al. (1951) was chosen for its historical significance and as the most cited paper in the Web of Science Index, with 305,148 citations. This classic paper introduced the Lowry protein assay, a foundational method in biochemical research, illustrating both the longevity and influence of scientific methodologies. Together, these articles provide an interdisciplinary lens through which to examine AI’s impact on language, thought, and scientific processes.
Guided by the theoretical frameworks of Agha (2007) and Silverstein (2023, 1976), this paper investigates how AI bots enact socially recognizable identities and adapt linguistic strategies to perform specific roles. For more grounded theoretical support, Wolfram’s (2023) insights into the mechanics of neural networks for GenAI offer a technical understanding of how language models structure and replicate human communication. Agha’s concept of enregisterment and Silverstein’s notions of contextual shifters frame the analysis of how bots simulate conversational practices that align with human rituals: “The Podcast”.

Grazia Ting Deng's Chinese Espresso: Contested Race and Convivial Space in Contemporary Italy (2024) is a compelling ethnographic study that explores the paradox of Chinese immigrants managing and owning coffee bars in Italy-an industry traditionally regarded as a cornerstone of Italian cultural identity.

Komunikacja w pracy zawodowej będąca rodzajem relacji nierównorzędnej (przełożony -podwładny, np. nauczyciel -uczeń, nauczyciel -student, lekarz -pacjent) i relacji instytucjonalnej (np. urząd, szkoła, uczelnia, szpital) jest warunkowana poprzez oficjalną sytuację komunikacyjną 1 . Porozumiewanie się w takiej przestrzeni komunikacyjnej (sytuacji, miejscu i czasie) wymaga od nadawcy i odbiorcy komunikatu posługiwania się określonym kodem i zachowania wymaganych reguł, zasad i norm oficjalności 2 . Z komunikacją językową, która jest "ustnym lub pisemnym działaniem werbalnym, polegającym na wzajemnym przekazywaniu informacji przez uczestników wspólnoty" 3 , łączą się więc określone zachowania językowe nadawcy i odbiorcy, czyli przestrzeganie przez nich m.in. zasad etykiety językowej i estetyki słowa. Etykietę językową (stanowiącą część etykiety ogólnej i nazywaną także savoir-vivre, bon ton) określa się jako działanie językowe będące "wyrazem aprobowanego społecznie modelu grzeczności […], ogólnie rzecz ujmując -zbiór przyjętych w danej społeczności wzorów (strategii) językowych zachowań 1

Komunikacja w pracy zawodowej będąca rodzajem relacji nierównorzędnej (przełożony -podwładny, np. nauczyciel -uczeń, nauczyciel -student, lekarz -pacjent) i relacji instytucjonalnej (np. urząd, szkoła, uczelnia, szpital) jest warunkowana poprzez oficjalną sytuację komunikacyjną 1 . Porozumiewanie się w takiej przestrzeni komunikacyjnej (sytuacji, miejscu i czasie) wymaga od nadawcy i odbiorcy komunikatu posługiwania się określonym kodem i zachowania wymaganych reguł, zasad i norm oficjalności 2 . Z komunikacją językową, która jest "ustnym lub pisemnym działaniem werbalnym, polegającym na wzajemnym przekazywaniu informacji przez uczestników wspólnoty" 3 , łączą się więc określone zachowania językowe nadawcy i odbiorcy, czyli przestrzeganie przez nich m.in. zasad etykiety językowej i estetyki słowa. Etykietę językową (stanowiącą część etykiety ogólnej i nazywaną także savoir-vivre, bon ton) określa się jako działanie językowe będące "wyrazem aprobowanego społecznie modelu grzeczności […], ogólnie rzecz ujmując -zbiór przyjętych w danej społeczności wzorów (strategii) językowych zachowań 1

We present an overview of the second edition of the Spoken CALL Shared Task. Groups competed on a prompt-response task using English-language data collected, through an online CALL game, from Swiss German teens in their second and third years of learning English. Each item consists of a written German prompt and an audio file containing a spoken response. The task is to accept linguistically correct responses and reject linguistically incorrect ones, with "linguistically correct" defined by a gold standard derived from human annotations. Scoring was performed using a metric defined as the ratio of the relative rejection rates on incorrect and correct responses. The second edition received eighteen entries and showed very substantial improvement on the first edition; all entries were better than the best entry from the first edition, and the best score was about four times higher. We present the task, the resources, the results, a discussion of the metrics used, and an analysis of what makes items challenging. In particular, we present quantitative evidence suggesting that incorrect responses are much more difficult to process than correct responses, and that the most significant factor in making a response challenging is its distance from the closest training example.

This paper presents the experiments and results obtained by the SUKI team in the Discriminating between Dutch and Flemish in Subtitles shared task of the VarDial 2018 Evaluation Campaign. Our best submission was ranked 8th, obtaining macro F1-score of 0.61. Our best results were produced by a language identifier implementing the HeLI method without any modifications. We describe, in addition to the best method we used, some of the experiments we did with unsupervised clustering.

In this paper we describe the systems we used when participating in the VarDial Evaluation Campaign organized as part of the 7th workshop on NLP for similar languages, varieties and dialects. The shared tasks we participated in were the second edition of the Romanian Dialect Identification (RDI) and the first edition of the Social Media Variety Geolocation (SMG). The submissions of our SUKI team used generative language models based on Naive Bayes and character n-grams.

This article introduces the Wanca 2017 web corpora from which the sentences written in minor Uralic languages were collected for the test set of the Uralic Language Identification (ULI) 2020 shared task. We describe the ULI shared task and how the test set was constructed using the Wanca 2017 corpora and texts in different languages from the Leipzig corpora collection. We also provide the results of a baseline language identification experiment conducted using the ULI 2020 dataset.

This paper presents the experiments and results obtained by the SUKI team in the Indo-Aryan Language Identification shared task of the VarDial 2018 Evaluation Campaign. The shared task was an open one, but we did not use any corpora other than what was distributed by the organizers. A total of eight teams provided results for this shared task. Our submission using a HeLI-method based language identifier with iterative language model adaptation obtained the best results in the shared task with a macro F1-score of 0.958.

In this paper we present the experiments and results by the SUKI team in the German Dialect Identification shared task of the VarDial 2018 Evaluation Campaign. Our submission using HeLI with adaptive language models obtained the best results in the shared task with a macro F1score of 0.686, which is clearly higher than the other submitted results. Without some form of unsupervised adaptation on the test set, it might not be possible to reach as high an F1-score with the level of domain difference between the datasets of the shared task. We describe the methods used in detail, as well as some additional experiments carried out during the shared task.

This article describes the experiments and systems developed by the SUKI team for the second edition of the Romanian Dialect Identification (RDI) shared task which was organized as part of the 2021 VarDial Evaluation Campaign. We submitted two runs to the shared task and our second submission was the overall best submission by a noticeable margin. Our best submission used a character n-gram based naive Bayes classifier with adaptive language models. We describe our experiments on the development set leading to both submissions.

This paper presents the experiments and results obtained by the SUKI team in the Discriminating between Dutch and Flemish in Subtitles shared task of the VarDial 2018 Evaluation Campaign. Our best submission was ranked 8th, obtaining macro F1-score of 0.61. Our best results were produced by a language identifier implementing the HeLI method without any modifications. We describe, in addition to the best method we used, some of the experiments we did with unsupervised clustering.

This paper presents the results of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2020 organized as part of the seventh workshop on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), co-located with COLING 2020. The campaign included three shared tasks each focusing on a different challenge of language and dialect identification: Romanian Dialect Identification (RDI), Social Media Variety Geolocation (SMG), and Uralic Language Identification (ULI). The campaign attracted 30 teams who enrolled to participate in one or multiple shared tasks and 14 of them submitted runs across the three shared tasks. Finally, 11 papers describing participating systems are published in the VarDial proceedings and referred to in this report.

In this paper we present the experiments and results by the SUKI team in the German Dialect Identification shared task of the VarDial 2018 Evaluation Campaign. Our submission using HeLI with adaptive language models obtained the best results in the shared task with a macro F1-score of 0.686, which is clearly higher than the other submitted results. Without some form of unsupervised adaptation on the test set, it might not be possible to reach as high an F1-score with the level of domain difference between the datasets of the shared task. We describe the methods used in detail, as well as some additional experiments carried out during the shared task.

This article introduces the Wanca 2017 web corpora from which the sentences written in minor Uralic languages were collected for the test set of the Uralic Language Identification (ULI) 2020 shared task. We describe the ULI shared task and how the test set was constructed using the Wanca 2017 corpora and texts in different languages from the Leipzig corpora collection. We also provide the results of a baseline language identification experiment conducted using the ULI 2020 dataset.

This paper presents the experiments and results obtained by the SUKI team in the Indo-Aryan Language Identification shared task of the VarDial 2018 Evaluation Campaign. The shared task was an open one, but we did not use any corpora other than what was distributed by the organizers. A total of eight teams provided results for this shared task. Our submission using a HeLI-method based language identifier with iterative language model adaptation obtained the best results in the shared task with a macro F1-score of 0.958.

This article describes the experiments and systems developed by the SUKI team for the second edition of the Romanian Dialect Identification (RDI) shared task which was organized as part of the 2021 VarDial Evaluation Campaign. We submitted two runs to the shared task and our second submission was the overall best submission by a noticeable margin. Our best submission used a character n-gram based naive Bayes classifier with adaptive language models. We describe our experiments on the development set leading to both submissions.

In this paper, I examine cultural citizenship not as a stable fact but as the product of everyday practice. The analysis focuses on educational discourses and classroom interactions in the school of a rural town in Spain and in relation to Moroccan immigrant children's membership and identity. I show how teachers engage in distinction, authentication, and authorization practices, playing on essentialist notions of children's ethnolinguistic identities and upholding notions of belonging to the nation that are predicated on homogeneity. This paper also examines how Moroccan immigrant children contest teachers' essentialist formulations by asserting multiple, hybrid forms of membership and belonging.

We investigate the creation of a robust algorithm for document identification and page ordering in a digital mail room in the banking sector. PaperClip is a system that takes dossiers containing pages of various documents as input, and returns multiple files that contain all the pages of one document in the correct order. PaperClip performs (1) document type classification and (2) page number classification on each page, and then (3) merges the results. We experimented with various algorithms and methods for these three steps and we performed an elaborate evaluation to measure different aspects of the methods. The best performing setup achieved a cut F-score of 86% and a V-measure of 0.91%. This performance is sufficient to fulfill business needs of the banking sector.

This study investigates how Jordanian readers accomplish positioning of self and other in online comments on the news and the strategies they deploy to accomplish this positioning. The data come from 500 reader comments posted on two active Jordanian news websites during 2014 and 2015 in response to various local political, social, and economic events during that period. The analysis shows that readers seek to accomplish self and other positioning through three main strategies: impoliteness and face attack, invoking of national identity, and invoking of religious identity. Acts of positioning include positioning of self as burdened citizen vs. positioning of government as corrupt and self-seeking, and positioning of self as a loyal community member vs. positioning of other as disloyal.

This article investigates the articulation of the thumb in flat handshapes (B handshapes) in Sign Language of the Netherlands. On the basis of phonological models of handshape, the hypothesis was generated that the thumb state is variable and will undergo coarticulatory influences of neighboring signs. This hypothesis was tested by investigating thumb articulation in signs with B handshapes that occur frequently in the Corpus NGT. Manual transcriptions were made of the thumb state in two dimensions and of the spreading of the fingers in a total of 728 tokens of 14 sign types, and likewise for the signs on the left and right of these targets, as produced by 61 signers. Linear mixed-effects regression (LME4) analyses showed a significant prediction of the thumb state in the target sign based on the thumb state in the preceding as well as following neighboring sign. Moreover, the degree of spreading of the other fingers in the target sign also influenced the position of the thumb. We conclude that there is evidence for phonological models of handshapes in sign languages that argue that not all fingers are relevant in all signs. Phonological feature specifications can single out specific fingers as the articulators, leaving other fingers unspecified. We thus argue that the standard term 'handshape' is in fact a misnomer, as it is typically not the shape of the whole hand that is specified in the lexicon.

This chapter examines Indian stand-up comedy with a focus on political humour and how it serves as a form of resistance. The rise of political comedy in India has been driven by a growing desire for social and political change, with comedians using satire and parody as rhetorical tools to challenge authority and hold politicians accountable. Another particularly noteworthy aspect of this trend is the increasing representation of women in Indian stand-up comedy, as female comedians are using this platform to engage in a complex interplay of self-deprecation and celebration of their bodies to enact subversion. Quite interestingly, both men and women are contesting for women’s rights, verbalizing the abject reality of gender politics, sometimes woven within larger cultural or national political scenarios. Through Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope, we have attempted to analyse 50 Indian stand-up comedy performances by both male and female artists. The objective is to understand how time and space within a chronotopic analysis are marked by temporal and spatial elements as tools for political and gender-based resistance. The chapter argues that the notion of chronotope is a crucial site for the production and negotiation of contextual meaning, as it offers a unique perspective on the ways in which comedy can function as a means of social critique and political commentary. This chapter further proposes the notion of ‘hybridization of space-space’ configuration within the same comic moment, examining how these comedians are using humour to challenge societal norms and push for change.

The current study examined sentence recognition across speaking styles (conversational, neutral, and clear) in quiet and multi-talker babble (MTB) for cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing listeners under CI simulations. Listeners demonstrated poorer recognition accuracy in MTB than in quiet, but were relatively more accurate with clear speech overall. Within CI users, higher-performing participants were also more accurate in MTB when listening to clear speech. Lower performing users' accuracy was not impacted by speaking style. Clear speech may facilitate recognition in MTB for high-performing users, who may be better able to take advantage of clear speech cues.