This cross‐sectional study investigated the impact of length of instruction, out‐of‐school exposure to foreign language input, and gender on learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge in two foreign ...languages: French (first foreign language) and English (second foreign language). The findings suggest that, although length of instruction correlated positively with vocabulary knowledge in English and French, the gains remained modest when out‐of‐school exposure to the foreign language input was limited. Despite fewer years of English instruction, participants’ vocabulary knowledge in English was considerably larger than their French vocabulary knowledge, which can be explained by their large amounts of out‐of‐school exposure to English language input. Participants’ online activities in particular had a positive effect on their vocabulary knowledge in English. Although gender influenced participants’ engagement with online activities in English, gender did not have a direct effect on their vocabulary knowledge, as the structural equation modeling analysis showed.
Open Practices
This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. The test materials are publicly accessible via the IRIS database at https://www.iris-database.org: The English VocabLab test (https://www.iris-database.org/iris/app/home/detail?id=york%3a933919) and The French VocabLab test (https://www.iris-database.Org/iris/app/home/detail?id=york%3a933777). Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.
De Waagmeester van de woordenschat Steurs, Frieda; Heylen, Kris
Nederlandse taalkunde (Groningen),
10/2022, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper focuses on the merits of Dirk Geeraerts in the field of lexicology, lexicography and lexical semantics. The article highlights some of the major achievements and insights in the field ...developed by Geeraerts. From the very first beginning of his research and the publication of his PhD, his work at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology up to the development of his academic career at KU Leuven, Geeraerts’ research focus is on the lexicon. The paper highlights how this research was born out of, and nurtured by, an ongoing dialectic between the practice of lexicography and the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics.
The paper deals with the qualitative and quantitative parameters of equivalence between the realizations of epistemic possibility in English and Lithuanian. The focus of the contrast is on the ...auxiliary and adverb strategies (van der Auwera et al. 2005) in English (can, could, may, might vs. maybe, perhaps, possibly) as opposed to the corresponding modal verb and adverb/particle strategies in Lithuanian (galėti "can/could/may/might" vs. gal, galgi, galbūt, rasi, lyg ir "maybe/perhaps/possibly"). The purpose of the corpus-based study is to find out which means of expression are preferable in the two languages and what the scope of their meanings is. The paper will also look at the frequency of epistemic and non-epistemic use of the modal expressions in the original and in translation.
Change of Paradigms – New Paradoxes Jocelyne Daems, Eline Zenner, Kris Heylen, Dirk Speelman, Hubert Cuyckens / Jocelyne Daems, Eline Zenner, Kris Heylen, Dirk Speelman, Hubert Cuyckens
2015
eBook
In Paradigm and Paradox, Dirk Geeraerts formulated many of the basic tenets that were to form what Cognitive Linguistics is today. Change of Paradigms –New Paradoxes links back to this seminal work, ...exploring which of the original theories and ideas still stand strong, which new questions have arisen and which ensuing new paradoxes need to be addressed. It thus reveals how Cognitive Linguistics has developed and diversified over the past decades.
Distributional semantics embodies the idea that the context in which a word occurs reveals the meaning of that word. In contemporary corpus linguistics, that idea takes shape in various types of ...quantitative context analysis. This monograph explores how count-based token-level semantic vector spaces, as an advanced form of such a quantitative methodology, can be applied to the study of polysemy, lexical variation, and lectometry. What can distributional models reveal about meaning? How can they be used to analyse the semantic relationship between near-synonyms? And how can they contribute to the study of lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable? The book details the conceptual background of lexical semantic and lexical variation research, explains the mechanism of distributional modelling, and introduces distributional workflows and corpus linguistic tools to answer the questions. Combining a cognitive linguistic interest in meaning with a sociolinguistic interest in variation, it illustrates that distributional methodology with case studies on Dutch and Spanish lexical data, focusing on the value of distributional models for semantic analysis, the interaction of semasiological and onomasiological change, and sociolinguistic issues of lexical standardization and pluricentricity.
The construction Beste boek ooit (‘Best book ever!’) comes in different forms in Dutch. Variation is not only attested in the absence or presence of determiners and postmodifiers, but also in code ...choice: English, Dutch and hybrid (Beste boek ever!) variants occur.
This article investigates differentiation between instances with ooit and instances with ever. To ensure sufficient signal, we adopt a bird's eye perspective, analyzing over 100,000 observations from a Twitter corpus from the Low Countries (period 2011–2016). Our results reveal that (1) the two constructional variants increase in frequency in the time period under study, (2) this increase is more pronounced for the ooit-variant; (3) the ever-variant undergoes specialization towards a pragmatically marked form.
Overall, our account complements anglicism research (Andersen 2014) in four ways. First, we foreground constructional borrowing instead of single-word borrowing. Second, in working with Twitter data, we break with the tradition of print media corpora. Third, we explore NLP based methods for large datasets sampled from big data collections in a field of research that has mainly relied on manual coding of small-scale datasets. Finally, we illustrate how matter and pattern replication can go hand in hand in contact-induced change.
•This study foregrounds constructional borrowing instead of single-word borrowing.•In working with Twitter data, we break with the tradition of print media corpora typical of anglicism research.•Our study explores NLP approaches in a field of research that has mainly relied on manual coding of small-scale datasets.•We illustrate how matter and pattern replication can go hand in hand in contact-induced pragmatic change.
Dans le domaine du Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN), les modèles sémantiques distributionnels sont les piliers pour modéliser la sémantique lexicale à grande échelle (Turney & ...Pantel 2010). Ils sont fondés sur le calcul de la proximité sémantique entre mots sur la base des contextes partagés. La modélisation distributionnelle permet aux linguistes d’appuyer leurs analyses sur de grandes quantités de données authentiques et d’élargir la base empirique, pour ainsi détecter des motifs sémantiques intéressants (Geeraerts, 2010 : 165-178). Dans cet article, nous procédons à une présentation non technique de la modélisation sémantique distributionnelle et nous discutons une application lexicologique pour l’analyse de la polysémie. Finalement, nous présentons une méthode de visualisation qui permet aux experts humains d’interpréter les structures sémantiques cernées par les modèles distributionnels.
Within Computational Linguistics, distributional semantic models have become the mainstay in the large-scale modelling of word meaning. They are based on the principle that the semantic similarity ...between words can be calculated by comparing the typical contexts they occur in within a corpus. Distributional models also hold a large potential for research in Linguistics proper. It allows linguists to base their analysis on large amounts of usage data, thus vastly extending their empirical basis, and making it possible to detect potentially interesting semantic patterns. In this article, we give a non-technical introduction to distributional semantic models and we present a lexicological application to the analysis of polysemy. Finally, we introduce a visualisation method that allows human experts to interpret the semantic structure detected by the models.
Within Computational Linguistics, distributional semantic models have become the mainstay in the large-scale modelling of word meaning (Turney & Pantel 2010). They are based on the principle that the ...semantic similarity between words can be calculated by comparing the typical contexts they occur in within a corpus. Distributional models also hold a large potential for research in Linguistics proper. It allows linguists to base their analysis on large amounts of usage data, thus vastly extending their empirical basis, and making it possible to detect potentially interesting semantic patterns (Geeraerts, 2010:165-178). In this article, we give a non-technical introduction to distributional semantic models and we present a lexicological application to the analysis of polysemy. Finally, we introduce a visualisation method that allows human experts to interpret the semantic structure detected by the models. Dans le domaine du Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN), les modèles sémantiques distributionnels sont les piliers pour modéliser la sémantique lexicale à grande échelle (Turney & Pantel 2010). Ils sont fondés sur le calcul de la proximité sémantique entre mots sur la base des contextes partagés. La modélisation distributionnelle permet aux linguistes d'appuyer leurs analyses sur de grandes quantités de données authentiques et d'élargir la base empirique, pour ainsi détecter des motifs sémantiques intéressants (Geeraerts, 2010 : 165-178). Dans cet article, nous procédons à une présentation non technique de la modélisation sémantique distributionnelle et nous discutons une application lexicologique pour l'analyse de la polysémie. Finalement, nous présentons une méthode de visualisation qui permet aux experts humains d'interpréter les structures sémantiques cernées par les modèles distributionnels.
In this paper, we revisit earlier analyses of the distribution of er ‘there’ in adjunct-initial sentences to demonstrate the merits of computational upscaling in syntactic variation research. ...Contrary to previous studies, in which major semantic and pragmatic predictors (viz. adjunct type, adjunct concreteness, and verb specificity) had to be coded manually, the present study operationalizes these predictors on the basis of distributional analysis: instead of hand-coding for specific semantic classes, we determine the semantic class of the adjunct, verb, and subject automatically by clustering the lexemes in those slots on the basis of their ‘semantic passport’ (as established on the basis of their distributional behaviour in a reference corpus). These clusters are subsequently interpreted as proxies for semantic classes. In addition, the pragmatic factor ‘subject predictability’ is operationalized automatically on the basis of collocational attraction measures, as well as distributional similarity between the other slots and the subject. We demonstrate that the distribution of ercan be modelled equally successfully with the automated approach as in manual annotation-based studies. Crucially, the new method replicates our earlier findings that the Netherlandic data are easier to model than the Belgian data, and that lexical collocations play a bigger role in the Netherlandic than in the Belgian data. On a methodological level, the proposed automatization opens up a window of opportunities. Most important is its scalability: it allows for a larger gamut of alternations that can be investigated in one study, and for much larger datasets to represent each alternation.
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