Tanulmányok
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to present the results of a study into gender differences in the use of the discourse markers you know and I mean. The data for analysis is taken from televised interviews, the methodology of the research combines qualitative and quantitative tools and involves mapping the functions of you know and I mean on the basis of previous research and the tokens in the test corpus, categorising the total number of occurrences in the full corpus as well as identifying co-occurrence patterns. The results seem to contradict previous claims that women use discourse markers more frequently as well as the hypothesis that men and women use discourse markers for radically different interpersonal and discourse functions.
Keywords: sociolinguistics, discourse variation, discourse markers, gender differences
Abstract
This study investigates the phonological differences between Written Arabic (hereafter WA) and Madani Arabic (hereafter MA) as an aspect of diglossia. The differences identified in this study between WA and MA prove that there is a wide gulf between the two varieties. Many of the differences found are quite common in situations where other different spoken dialects are compared with WA (cf., Blanc 1953, Harrel 1960 and Suleiman 1985). The emergence of the long vowels /e:/ and /o:/, the consonantal changes /./ > /./, /č/ > /t/, /đ/ > /z/ or /d/, /d./ > /./ and /q/ > /?/, and insertion of anaptyctic vowels lead to declusterization and initial cluster formation or some such phonological changes. The trend in Arabic diglossia in general proves to be that there are clear cut linguistic differences between WA and different spoken varieties, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the distinctive identities of the spoken dialects are also simultaneously maintained. The situation on the whole reflects the maintenance of cultural unity within linguistic diversity among different Arabic communities.
Keywords: diglossia, Arabic Language, Jordanian Arabic, phonological changes
Abstract
Based on the classic thesis that the relationship of sound shapes and meanings is arbitrary, linguistics has, as a rule, studied the semantics of words without reference to the phonotactic properties of sound patterns. Mainstream structuralist and formalist approaches have repeatedly claimed that they would draw a sharp line between "meaning", conceived as an absolute notion and defined as the sum of particular sense properties, on the one hand, and incidental "interpretation" on the other. Regarding word meaning as an intrinsically relative concept, deriving it from the presence or absence of various semantic constituents, appears to be rather infrequent, and virtually restricted to cognitive linguistics. Assuming the principle that as soon as we understand the formation of a particular phenomenon, we can understand the phenomenon itself, the present paper investigates the ontogenesis of the semantic properties of words, pointing out that word meanings can only be linguistic entities formed in terms of patterns embedded in the social-cognitive context, and evolving in organic unity with the patterns of sound.
Keywords: language acquisition, syllabic patterns, statistic learning, prototypes, the acquisition of words/word meanings, contextual embeddedness
Abstract
The aim of the present paper is to provide insight into the German-Hungarian contrastive grammar project with special emphasis on its part concerning text linguistic problems. It will be shown which phenomena are dealt with here, i.e. how the relevant chapter of the planned contrastive grammar is structured. Furthermore, an attempt is made to shed light on the conception of Ulrich Engel (which the whole grammar is based on) as regards text types. A sample contrastive analysis of the text type newspaper article is also presented.
Keywords: Keywords: contrastive text linguistics, German language, Hungarian language, text types
Abstract
The paper gives an overview of the grammar of particle verb constructions in English and Hungarian, and outlines the framework of an LFG-theoretic analysis and its computational implementation that tackles both the lexical and the syntactic properties of these constructions.
Keywords: particle verbs, English, Hungarian, Lexical-Functional Grammar, computational implementation
Abstract
This study investigates the relationship between social and cultural factors in the request behaviour of native speakers of American English and Hungarian. It also tests the extent to which speakers’ directness is influenced by social factors, such as distance, power and imposition. It examines whether the request strategies of American English speakers and of Hungarian native speakers follow a similar trend across different social situations; and if so how and to what extent they are similar. Requests were chosen because they intrinsically involve the usage of politeness strategies; and they are frequently used in everyday situations.
Results have shown that there is a great degree of correspondance between the two cultural groups in terms of general trends of situational variation, at the same time, there are cross-cultural differences in the specific directness levels employed for particular situations. This study argues that distance, power and imposition alone do not always decide speaker’s level of directness. A number of situational and cultural factors need to be taken into consideration when interpreting speakers’ linguistic choices.
Keywords: politeness, politeness strategies, requests
Abstract
The aim of the paper is to give a brief analysis of activity verb predicates in English and to show various mechanisms of encoding telicity of these predicates in English and Hungarian. Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity in these languages are either marking an object as countable, i.e., a quantized object, or utilizing a specific particle (also recognized as “coverb” in Hungarian) on the verbal form. English predominantly uses the first mechanism, while Hungarian mostly utilizes the second. The class of activity predicates is the most ‘productive’ of all the event types revealed in the literature in the sense of accepting telicizing particles.
Keywords: telicity, particles, activity verb, quantized object, perfectivity
Abstract
It is known that English and Hungarian have semelfactive verbs, similar to Russian, but there is only an occasional mention of the exact types of these verbs in the literature and their role in the overall system of English and Hungarian aspect. This paper challenges an analysis of semelfactive verbs in English and Hungarian describing semantic and morphological characteristics associated with these verbs. The exact classification of semelfactive verbs in both languages is another goal of this study. In English, the term “semelfactive” for punctual events is adopted for general use by Smith (1991) and Verkuyl (1993), among other writers. It will be argued that punctual events are not all semelfactive in Smith’s (1991) sense.
Keywords: semelfactive, punctual, durative events, instantaneous
Abstract
The works of Chrétien de Troyes are constituted by easy to be found and linguistically well-defined, repeated structural units which contribute to the textual coherence and to the linear division of the works and which are composed of clearly separable motifs succeding in a definite order. In my study, my aim is to observe the places compared to one another and the textual junction of the motifs constituting the night lodging and hospitality, structural unit that determines the adventure seeking way of the heroes and constitutes a turning point in the stories, with the consideration of the thematic progression and the linguistic means representing a textual unit boundary through three episodes of similar structure in the romance of Chrétien de Troyes entitled Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (the episodes selected are the adventure of Yvain at the fountaine, Harpin de la Montagne, Pesme-Aventure).
Keywords: Chrétien de Troyes, knightly adventure, night lodging and hospitality, textual units, textual unit boundary, thematic progression, proppian functions.
Abstract
Dyslexia, a reading disorder, is considered as the most common language disability in which individuals experience difficulties with language processing and specifically with reading. In spite of its widespread nature in Iran, not too many studies have been carried out on dyslexia compared to English-speaking countries. Also, the available studies have mostly focused on dyslexia in native language rather than in foreign language context so the findings in L2 context are not rich. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether Iranian dyslexic students have difficulties learning foreign languages (English and Arabic) and also to highlight the areas in which these individuals show the most difficulty. By the help of a questionnaire, information was gathered about the situation of dyslexic students as foreign language learners in middle schools. The findings showed that Iranian dyslexic students encounter many difficulties in learning English and Arabic as foreign languages and they are significantly weak in spelling, reading and phonological processing compared to normal students .
Keywords: Developmental Dyslexia, Reading, Foreign language learning, Middle school
Abstract
This study examines the usage of the letter \ in the Milyatin Codex (from the late 12th or early 13th century), which was written in Old Russian. The Codex contains several examples that reflect the changes of the sound marked by \ in the Proto-Slavic clusters *tert, *telt, and its usage in various morphemes. The analysis demonstrates some Old Russian features, the manifestation of the eastern Church Slavic orthographic norm, and the Novgorod origin of the Codex. The study contributes to a better understanding of the changes in the Russian phonological system.
Keywords: Milyatin Codex, East Church Slavic, Old Russian, clusters, *tert, *telt, Proto-Slavic
Abstract
The aim of this article is to provide insights on the importance of genre awareness in the study, correct understanding and accurate use of Professional and Academic Language (PAL), with special emphasis being placed on the language of industrial ceramics and that used in academia. First of all, the concept of PAL as the big “container” of specialised languages is put forward and linked with the notion of genre as a communicative event characterised by its recurrent, dynamic, recognisable, expectable and conventionalised nature and by the communicative purpose it aims to achieve. Such a description attempts to show how the correct understanding and use of PAL goes beyond merely terminological considerations and in fact needs genre so that it can be “packed” appropriately for the audience. Thus, the importance of genre in PAL is analysed from two main points of view: firstly, by focusing on its more professional aspects (dealing with the relevance of generic balance in corpus compilation and of genre awareness in general in discourse communities) and, secondly, by focusing on the importance of observing generic conventions (even “constraints”) in academia. Additionally, digital genres are also analysed as an increasingly significant way of packaging information, all this leading to the conclusion that genre awareness necessarily implies accomplishing the expectations and conventionalised use of language (both general or professional and academic) established by discourse communities.
Keywords: genre, Professional and Academic Language (PAL), specialised language, corpus, discourse community, cybergenre and industrial ceramics
Abstract: This paper analyses the treatment of inconsistencies in Optimality Theory by making use of the tools of the pmodel of plausible argumentation by Kertész & Rákosi (2012). With the help of a case study it reconstructs and evaluates the most frequent methods applied by OT. It shows that these strategies are based on the reconstruction of inconsistencies as “weak” inconsistency and can be interpreted as the joint application of the “contrastive” and “combinative” strategies of the treatment of inconsistencies. Since the p-model interprets linguistic theorising as a problem solving process, it is capable of describing the characteristic of OT that it subscribes a constitutive role to the continuous emergence and resolution of inconsistencies. Therefore, it is possible to compare the techniques applied by OT to the handling of inconsistencies by Government and Binding Theory.
Keywords: Optimality Theory, inconsistency, plausible argumentation, p-model
Abstract: Statistical machine translation (SMT) often fails when faced with the problem of recognition of semantic relations in context. This article aims to give an overview and to detect possible reasons of semantic incoherence in translations. We try to demonstrate what effect the consideration of linguistic and natural language processing (NLP) methods can have on the quality of translations. We try to argue in favour of the introduction of word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods in the word selection process.
Keywords: Statistical machine translation, recognition of semantic relations, treatment of polysemy, word sense disambiguation
Abstract: Robots have been around for several decades with an ever increasing role, especially in industry. Nowadays they are used in information systems as well, e.g. public real-time dialogue systems. In order to assist humans in their diverse everyday needs, certain important steps are being made to create so-called smart robots. The more we wish robots to have human-like behaviour the more it becomes essential to study the nature of human-human communication in order to identify and possibly implement its major systemic characteristics in the technological world of robotics. This paper presents the outlines of a multimodal theory of communication that is aimed at both capturing the technologically relevant structure of human-human communication and offering a way of mapping such a structure onto technology. Since communication takes place simultaneously as a process of analysis and synthesis, we propose a two-way generative model assumed to be suitable to be equally adopted in both directions. Inspired by the basic approach of generative linguistics, the model wishes to meet the challenge of offering an interface between the qualitative multimodal features of communication and their quantitative representation in technology.
Keywords: human-computer interaction, language technology, human-human communication, arbitrary interpersonal communicative event, text-based interactive systems
Abstract: The paper addresses the study of the formal features of conversation from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. In particular, following the framework and terminology of Sacks, Schlegoff and Jefferson (1974), turn-taking and sequencing are designated ‘formal’ features of interaction. Furthermore, the study adopts and fits into the framework of the theoretical modelling of human–computer interaction (HCI), as outlined in Hunyadi (2011). After reviewing the theoretical background of the multimodal analysis of conversation, a communicative act-based pragmatic annotation system will be outlined which is to contribute to a better understanding of the sequential organization of interaction. Finally, a case study on the sequential organization of nonverbal cues for turn regulation as well as their alignment with verbal content will be described.
Keywords: multimodal analysis of conversation, pragmatic annotation system, turn management, nonverbal communication, human–computer interaction
Abstract: The basic assumption of the paper is that in order to model quasi–natural human-computer interactions, models of HCI must be based on the features of human–human communication. Therefore, we must focus on such properties which are suitable for analogue comparisons between naturally occuring human–human communication and human–computer interaction. The analogical similarities contribute to build quasi–natural models of human–computer interaction. The aim of my paper is to explore such properties of early social development which could inspire human–computer interaction models.
Keywords: infancy, social development, intermodal coordination, imitative learning, supramodal representation system, proprioception
Abstract: The aim of the paper is to present the results of five experiments that examined the connection between multimodality and basic emotions, and the role modalities play in emotion and information transfer within human communicative situations. The experiments were part of a project that aims to create a structural model for multimodal communication. A single video excerpt was used as a means for the study of the above mentioned phenomena: all of the experimental groups were provided with a different, manipulated version of the same video recording and were asked to fill in the same three-question survey. The manipulation of the recording was implemented in a way that emphasized different modalities in the five different excerpts. The summary and study of data obtained provided us with intriguing information about how emotions and multimodality are related in communication.
Keywords: communication theory, interpersonal communication, multimodality, emotion recognition, basic emotions
Abstract: The planning and creation of the HuComTech Multimodal Corpus is the latest sub-project of the HuComTech (Human-Computer Interaction Technologies) Research Team of Debrecen, Hungary. The sub-project is part of a project conducting research in multimodal human-machine communication. Currently the annotation of the corpus is underway, the questions arising during the annotation process are important from a linguistic point of view as well. Marking and differentiating the units of spontaneous speech and marking of disfluencies typical of spontaneous speech as well as structural and discourse characteristics have required to discuss the following problems: problems of segment boundary placement, differentiating elements with a pause-filling function, differentiating embeddings and insertions, differentiating iteration and restarting, usage of label hesitation and label backchannel in ambiguous cases. The present paper analyzes these questions and suggests solutions by describing examples from the corpus.
Keywords: spontaneous speech corpus, annotation, prosody research
Abstract: The Hungarian audio-visual corpus recording and annotation project is being carried out by the HuComTech (Hungarian Human-Computer Interaction Technologies) research group at the University of Debrecen and is a part of a comprehensive multimodal human-machine interaction modelling project. The research contributes to the exact knowledge of the overlaps between the verbal and nonverbal aspects of communicative events and prosodic features through the examination of spontaneous speech, with special regard to syntactical embeddings, insertions, iterations, hesitations and restarts, various kinds of emotions and discourse markers. The efficiency of speech recognition systems can also be increased by proper acoustic preprocessing and investigation of the suprasegmental characteristics of spontaneous speech. Concerning Hungarian, the lack of a multimodal, prosodically labelled, representative spontaneous speech corpus makes the development more difficult. The spontaneous multimodal corpus is being recorded via guided – formal and informal – conversations. During the conversations, several points are to be discussed in order to provoke longer monologues accompanied by gestures, facial expressions, and also including the above mentioned phenomena of spontaneous speech to be examined. The present paper focuses on the aspects of multimodal annotation, especially the details of the annotation of prosodic and suprasegmental features. The visual, nonverbal channel of these phenomena are also to be annotated thus we can examine and implement multimodal features and their overlaps as well.
Keywords: Hungarian audio-visual corpus recording, audio annotation, video annotation
Abstract: Estimating the head pose is an important ability of a computer when interacting with humans because the head pose usually indicates the focus of attention (Bennewit, Faber, Joho, Schreiber & Behnke 2005). In this paper, we present a novel method to estimate head pose over low-resolution web camera images. Our approach proceeds in three stages. First, a face detector localizes faces on the input image. Then, classifiers trained with AdaBoost using Haar-like features, detect distinctive facial features namely the mouth, the nose tip and the eyes. Based on the positions of these features, finally the POSIT algorithm estimates the three continuous rotation angles and the translation vector, what we use later fore head pose modeling. Since we have a compact representation in case of faces – using only few distinctive features –, so thus our approach is computationally highly efficient. As we show in experiments with standard databases as well as with real-time image data, our system locates the distinctive features with a high accuracy and provides robust estimating of head pose.
Keywords: Head pose estimation, facial features detection, human-computer interaction
Abstract: Computer image processing is a diversified area of information technology. Automatic age estimation, emotion, gender and race recognition based on the human face is an interesting and challenging task. In addition, this knowledge can be useful in such fields as the security industry, psychology and entertainment.
The purpose is to extract certain attributes of a person from a video stream or image. This process is built up from several steps: loading the input image from a sequence, face detection, cropping the desired face, preprocessing and classification. Our goal is to find the appropriate techniques both for preprocessing and classification.
In the experiments below we used face cropping and Local Binary Patterns for preprocessing and Support Vector Machines for classification. We performed the observations for each partition of each aspect using different parameter configurations. The results are collected in tables.
Keywords: face analysis, gesture recognition, local binary patterns
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