Language Differences and Literary Values: Divagations from a Theme.

In migrant communities, parents and children not only represent two diverse generations, but two different languages and cultures. As migrants who still carry memories of their homeland and culture close to their hearts, many are tied linguistically, culturally, and emotionally to their native country and culture. Language maintenance in migrant families assists parents and their children not only to communicate but to also understand cultural values better, which are crucial to their identity and worldview. Although research on community languages has flourished since Michael Clyne’s pioneering work on community language maintenance in the 1960s, there is limited understanding of the role of migrant families in maintaining and transmitting a community language and its influence on identity in Australia. Specific research on Rioplatense Spanish language maintenance and Argentinean identity within the Argentinean community has remained largely unexamined in the contemporary global landscape. In particular, we lack research on how and why first and second generation Argentineans maintain the Spanish language, but more specifically, Rioplatense Spanish and the consequences this has for their experience of Argentinean identity. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap for Australia and elsewhere by examining and discussing the following four themes. First, the central role of the family (as opposed to governments) in conceptualising and implementing language maintenance and identity practices. Second, the influence of familial (endogamous and exogamous unions, extended family, siblings, and language strategies) and extra-familial factors (social networks, travel, language status, and institutions) in augmenting the development and maintenance of community language literacy skills and identity. Third, how linguistic strategies and attitudes are dynamic and play a role in the process of language learning and maintenance, and last, the role and consumption of media (print, audio, audio-visual, and digital communication technologies), and technology in community language maintenance and identity. This thesis analyses the results of a two-step study, drawing upon data derived from mixed-methods research. First, a community-based survey of first and second generation Argentineans from Australia’s three largest cities — Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane — examined respondents’ use and maintenance of the Spanish language and the influence this has on their experience of Argentinean identity. Second, semi-structured interviews with first and second generation Argentineans were conducted to verify and triangulate survey findings and develop insights derived from the survey data. The analyses of the survey and interview data in this thesis provide insights into how the attitudes and actions of first generation Argentineans since the 1970s have influenced intergenerational ethnolinguistic vitality in Spanish language maintenance. This thesis illuminates our understanding by demonstrating how Argentineans in contemporary Australia maintain and transmit the Spanish language, their dialect Castellano Rioplatense [Rioplatense Spanish], and the implications this has for their experience of Argentinean identity. It also demonstrates that although the Argentinean community pertains to the broader Latin American community in Australia, they signal their uniqueness via their use of Rioplatense Spanish. The principal finding of this thesis is that despite Australia’s dominant monolingual landscape, first and second generation Argentineans continue to transmit and maintain Spanish, but more specifically, Rioplatense Spanish. Moreover, their use of Rioplatense Spanish allows them to maintain a distinct Argentinean identity in a multicultural context that otherwise publicly renders them as ‘Latin Americans.’ This thesis identifies four key elements in community language maintenance and identity. First, the family is the most salient factor in language maintenance and transmission. Second, the heterogeneity of the Argentinean community compared to other Latin American communities in Australia is reflected by their distinct use of Rioplatense Spanish, which maintains and ameliorates ethnolinguistic vitality, framing their Argentinean identity. Third, positive language attitudes within families further aids in the transference and maintenance of Rioplatense Spanish in various domains, at both micro and macro levels. Fourth, the consumption of media and digital communication technologies influences how the community language is used and experienced. This is achieved by individuals participating in diverse spaces that use and sustain not only the Spanish language, but more specifically, Rioplatense Spanish, and Argentinean identity. Hence, the use and maintenance of Spanish creates a sense of an imagined community, with individuals sensing that they mentally belong ‘here’ in Australia and ‘there’ in Argentina. The findings of this thesis have implications for promoting intergenerational language and identity within families, communities, pedagogical programming, educational and linguistic policies to facilitate language maintenance and identity opportunities.

This dissertation tracks what I term the public dispensability of language: the apportioning of particular language varieties to contexts deemed public by their users, and the dialectical, productive potential for language forms to assemble and shape publics of varying durability and form. The work of linguistic representation, as phenomena described in this dissertation demonstrate acutely, produces not only the people involved as participants in communication, but also the groupings to which they belong, against which they mobilize, through which they live their relationships to the world. These representational processes are deeply internalized and reproduced at both the most unremarkably quotidian and unabashedly spectacular scales. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in literacy classrooms, Kurdish language classes, and wider community spaces in Turkey, I examine how language is used in public and how language is used to assemble publics, and explore the fraught politics of a would-be public Kurdish. I investigate how ways with text – reading, writing, brandishing, and circulating text objects – become indices of, and means to, the transformations of selves, and explore some of the consequences – personal, political, linguistic, moral – that ensue. Although the official ban on Kurdish (the largest minority language in Turkey) was lifted in 1991, the use of Kurdish in public life in Turkey remains restricted and politically fraught. Decades of violent confrontation between state security forces and Kurdish militants continue to frame “the Kurdish question” in Turkey, defining national debates over the future of democratic pluralism and national security. In recent years, the Kurdish political project has been increasingly pitched in terms of expanded linguistic rights, particularly for “mother tongue education.” Yet the majority of able speakers – women and older generations, who grew up in monolingual rural settings – are also the least likely to have had formal schooling or to have developed comprehensive literacy skills. A paradox thus unfolds: a newly emergent Kurdish language press produces texts (grammars, novels, newspapers, etc.) that few can read, since those who wield literacy are unlikely to know Kurdish, and those most likely to be proficient in Kurdish are unlikely to know how to read. How do expectations around language forms both presuppose and produce contexts as variously public, and with what stakes for negotiations of political and personal sovereignty? I examine how language ideologies and linguistic practices mediate the everyday productions of self- and group-making, and highlight the importance of understanding the political economy of language in Turkey – the politics around which language is deployed in what contexts, to what purposes, and with what histories of association. Key words: language politics; publics; literacy; Kurdish; Turkey

Ever since the advent of generative theory, there has been a dispute in linguistics between formalist and functionalist approaches. At stake in this controversy is the autonomy thesis: i.e. the claim that linguistic knowledge is independent from, and irreducible to, the facts of language use. Under the autonomist view, language is both arbitrary and self-contained. Currently, the radically autonomous vision of syntax that is being pursued in Chomskyan circles has lent new urgency to the question whether phonology and syntax can in fact possess autonomy to the same degree. This problem has a long history (e.g. Anderson 1981), but it has lately received new and radical answers, notably through the Representational Hypothesis advanced by Burton-Roberts (2000) and Carr (2000): in the Representational Hypothesis, the language faculty is assumed to be radically autonomous, whereas phonology is functionally based and stands outside UG. This dissertation is concerned with the intermediate grammars and the variability that emerge in the course of linguistic change. It is based on evidence from the acquisition of Hebrew phonology and morphology, and a case study of a historical change affecting the grammar of Modern Hebrew. I propose a unified formal model for intermediate grammars in both language acquisition and (historical) language change, from a synchronic point of view, using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The topics discussed in this work are based on two different studies: (i) the acquisition path of Hebrew prosodic structure; and (ii) the variation involved in stop-fricative alternation in Modern Hebrew, as a result of historical changes. For both topics I suggest an Optimality Theoretic account of the phenomena, their cause, and their consequences. The study of language acquisition is based on two interrelated acquisition paths: (a) of prosodic structure of words out of morphological context; and (b) of prosodic structure within paradigms with regular morphophonological alternation, where the acquisition of Hebrew verb inflectional paradigms are examined. The acquisition path of words out of morphological context shows a pattern of gradual increase in prosodic structure (e.g. the number of syllables), involving a gradual increase in prosodic contrasts (e.g. diverse stress patterns), up until the child’s production is phonologically identical to the target forms. The increase in structure and contrast indicates a gradual transition from unmarked structures with input-output disparities (indicating phonological dominance) to marked structures, lacking input-output disparities (indicating lexical dominance). In the acquisition path of alternating paradigms, not only the child-adult relations are examined, but also the relation between words, where the target language itself exhibits input-output disparities, namely words drawn from alternating paradigms. This acquisition path provides evidence for the child’s restructuring of a lexical representation, as well as evidence for the transition from child-adult relation to the child’s input-output relation. In addition, I show that the phonological account of the acquisition of inflectional paradigms provides evidence for morphological development. One of the interesting findings in this regard is the emergence of morphological knowledge before actual inflectional suffixes are produced by the children. This finding would not be available without examining the interaction between prosodic and morphological factors. Another crucial finding dealt with in my study of acquisition is the scope of variation in the course of acquisition. I found that variation in children’s production is limited to the acquisition of the lexical contrasts existing in the language, and is not found in the acquisition of alternation resulting from phonological restrictions. The model I suggest for change in the course of acquisition predicts and explains this finding, based on evidence that children do not violate universal restrictions respected in the target language. The study of language change deals with spirantization in Modern Hebrew, where the alternation between stops and fricatives involves a great deal of opacity and free variation. The analysis suggested is based on a set of paradigms co- existing in the language and contradicting each other. I show that variation is restricted only to certain types of paradigms, conditioned by certain phonological properties. However, I argue that the co-existence of different types of paradigms indicates a change in the language, where the variable grammar is an intermediate phase, and the invariable paradigms indicate the direction of change. Similar to the acquisition path of single forms, and unlike the acquisition path of alternation within a paradigm, the direction of change in the case of Modern Hebrew spirantization is towards a loss of phonological generalization (i.e. towards lexical dominance). Through the investigation of language acquisition and language change, I examine in this work central issues in phonological theory, such as morphophonemic alternation and prosodic structure, in conditions of change. The phenomena investigated here provide insight to the nature of linguistic change in the following aspects: (i) the distinction between phonological properties that undergo change vs. phonological properties that do not undergo change; (ii) the directionality of change; and (iii) the scope of variation in the course of change. I argue that both language acquisition and language change share similar patterns with respect to these issues. Moreover, the change, its directionality and the variation involved, are accounted for by the same theoretical terms that account for the linguistic knowledge of a single ideal native speaker. I show that Optimality Theory suggests an appropriate theoretical framework for a unified generative analysis of this type.

The Language Question in the Learned Estonian Society Kersti Taal University of Tartu Library The purpose of the Learned Estonian Society (LES) established in 1838 became to promote knowledge about the past and future of the Estonian nation, its language and literature and the lands settled by Estonians. Thus, studying and developing the Estonian language was one of the most important tasks of the Society. In this article, the language question is viewed from two perspectives: researching the Estonian language in the 19th century and the transition from German to Estonian in 1928/1929. LES started its activity at a time when even the first Estonian intellectuals, the founding members of the Society, were not yet certain whether Estonian would develop into a cultural language or whether the language of this small nation would fade away. Both the Estonians and German Estophiles thought that the language should be studied at least for the benefit of the future generations. In addition to the lecturers of the Estonian language at the University of Tartu, D. H. Jürgenson and Fr. R. Faehlmann, language studies were conducted by German pastors in the first decades. The most important linguistic undertaking became the compilation of an Estonian-German dictionary. The work progressed slowly and the dictionary was completed by F. J. Wiedemann, a member of LES and an academician at the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences as late as in the 1860s. The Ehstnisch-deutsches Wörterbuch was published in 1869 by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences since LES lacked money for it. In the second half of the 19th century Estonian was studied by the Estonians J. Hurt, M. Veske, and others. Villem Reiman was involved in publishing examples to commemorate the Old Written Language and, thus, LES published Georg Müller’s sermons, Joachim Rossihnius’s catechism and sermons dating back to the 17th century. Although Estonian was not spoken in LES in the 19th century, the Society received letters in Estonian: they were not considered untoward since some of the German members of the society were also fluent in Estonian in addition to the Estonian members. In the 19th century, only a tenth of the Society members were Estonian. When LES recommenced its activity in 1919 in the Republic of Estonia as a German-language organisation, the Germans still held the majority (in 1921 only 36 of the 164 members were Estonian). The first Estonian-language presentation – “The water deity Noova of the Livonians” – was made by Lauri Kettunen, a Finnish professor of the Estonian language on 1 March 1922. In 1928, just before the tenth anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, most of the lectures in the University of Tartu were held in Estonian and the public was increasingly asking the question of how long would the Learned Estonian Society, which was supported by the state, continue to be a German-language organisation? During the 1928 March session, the Society started to discuss the proposal of Henrik Koppel, rector of the University of Tartu, to make Estonian the official language of the Learned Estonian Society. Although the Germans did not agree with the decision, they had to accept the situation, as theirs was a minority opinion. The Germans specifically opposed that the Society’s publications would be in Estonian. The yearbook and transactions remained in German since they were meant for knowledge exchange and introducing Estonian research abroad. The Letters publication series in which works on folk poetry and ethnography were published was started to be issued in Estonian. The Germans reacted to the LES turning into an Estonian-language organisation with withdrawal; Professor Walter Anderson resigned from the position of the Society chairman and no longer edited publications. A new, mainly Estonian board was elected as late as on 4 December 1929, as the Estonians did not hold the majority in the previous year. Julius Mark, professor of linguistics, was elected the chairman. The transition to Estonian was accompanied by great changes in the entire activity of the Society. The new management succeeded in getting more financial support for the Society and its publications developed into more extensive works. Since LES turned into an Estonian-language organisation, it did not meet the fate of many other German-language societies (E(h)stländische Literärische Gesellschaft, Pernauer Alterthumforschende Gesellschaft), which ended their activity in 1939 as the Baltic Germans left.

Translation is a frequently misunderstood process. Monolingual readers tend to believe that the literary translation they are reading offers a transparent reproduction of the meaning, style and effects of the original. However, those of us who are translators know that this is not so. This thesis highlights the agency of the translator, showing how different translation strategies colour the readers’ reception of the work, creating remarkably different impressions. I take up the case of Japanese-English literary translation and focus on the translation of metaphor, since metaphor is a key literary device and its translation poses particular challenges – including the need to switch between different cultural, conceptual and linguistic frames of reference. Research into metaphor translation strategies has only a short history and focuses mainly on European languages. The much larger linguistic and cultural divide between Japanese and English may require a different mix of strategies to effectively convey the author’s style and imagery. Through a comparative evaluation of the strategies adopted by translators in multiple translations of two well-known short stories: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s 刺青 (“Shisei”) and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s 羅生門 (“Rashōmon”), I explore the effectiveness of a range of strategies for translating metaphorical expressions. I show that in many cases, domesticating strategies are adopted by translators, such as replacing the source language metaphor with a target language metaphor of a similar sense; paraphrasing by removing the metaphor and translating only its sense; replacing a metaphor with a simile; or deleting the expression altogether. However, although the resulting translation may be smooth and readable, such strategies frequently soften the emotive force of the metaphorical expressions. I argue that the most successful approaches are those that recreate the effect of the original metaphor, often by using more foreignizing strategies that retain the Japanese imagery. My case studies also highlight the need for translators to decipher the intratextual and intertextual network of metaphors and attempt to maintain these sub-texts in their translation. This demonstrates the importance of interpretation in literary translation. I then use the insights gained from these case studies, including the importance of analysing the effect of metaphor and its communicative function in the context of the text as a whole, to develop an optimal translation approach. I apply this approach to the translation of two chapters from a contemporary Japanese novel (容疑者の夜行列車; Yōgisha no Yakōressha by Tawada Yōko to illustrate its potential. My overall conclusions are that the interpretive process requires an in-depth reading and analysis of the source text. This is necessary in order to determine the functions and effects of metaphorical expressions and prioritise those which should be retained. Translation strategies for each source text metaphor should be sensitive to the category of metaphor, its novelty, conceptual basis and cultural connotations. The translation strategy best able to recreate the most important effects should be adopted. This requires the translator to be flexible and willing to make use of compensatory strategies where necessary. Above all, the translator needs to exercise creativity to explore the target language possibilities, formulate innovative solutions and resist the easy option of domestication. To use a metaphor, the translator should be a traveller – crossing from one textual landscape to another and exploring the linguistic opportunities that would enable the effects of the original to be experienced in a new environment.

As a response to the dramatically ageing population in Taiwan, it is advised that Taiwanese linguists should consider conducting language studies in relation to ageing and older age. However, in existing literature, such studies are rather rare. Hence, the aim of my research is to make a contribution to fill in this research gap. Traditional sociolinguistic studies tend to treat older age as an explanatory factor to predict language variations that reflect a decremental tendency in communication competence as a consequence of ageing. My research, however, takes on a different (but constructionist) research orientation to investigate discourses of ageing and older age. Following the sociolinguistic trajectory established more than 20 years ago by British sociolinguists, Nik Coupland and Justine Coupland, blending social psychological and interpersonal communication analytic perspectives, this current study adopts multiple qualitative as well as quantitative data-collection and analytic methods (e.g. semi-structured interviews, questionnaire survey, natural conversations, statistic analysis, discourse analysis ) to approach questions regarding language and communication with the elderly and age disclosure behaviors in a specific context, that is, senior education or engaging in learning activities at later life. In conclusion, the research purposes can be unfolded into the three different layers: (1) to monitor the appropriateness in the language and communication with elderly learners in senior educational contexts (2) to associate language and communication studies with the wider social and cultural contexts from which the examined narratives and natural conversations are produced with a special interest on whether they reproduce, challenge or reinforce ageism or age stereotypes (3) ultimately to enhance the awareness of the role our daily use of language with the elderly plays so as to create an elder-friendly society as well as to increase the communication gratification elderly learners receive in the learning processes.

The research project used to frame discussion in this chapter was a doctoral study of the experiences of English primary school teachers teaching pupils whose home language was not English in their previously monolingual classrooms. They taught in a region in the south of England which experienced a significant rise in the population of non-native English speakers following Eastern European member states’ accession to the EU in 2004 and 2007. The study focussed principally on the teachers’ responses to their newly arrived Polish children because Polish families were arriving in far greater numbers than those from other countries. The research aims focussed on exploring and analysing the pedagogical experiences of teachers managing the acquisition of English language for their Polish children. Critical engagement with their experiences and the ways in which they did or did not adapt their pedagogy for teaching English was channelled through Bourdieuian constructs of linguistic field, capital and habitus. The following sections explore my reasons for adopting Bourdieu’s work as a theoretical lens, the practicalities and challenges of incorporating Bourdieu’s tools for thinking in data analysis, and the subsequent impact on my research activity.

Hungary is a monolingual state in Central Eastern Europe, where the Hungarian language, as the official language, is spoken by the whole population, including persons belonging to national and linguistic minorities. On the territory of Hungary, in the course of history, there have always lived representatives of other cultures and speakers of other languages. Nevertheless, in terms of the ability of speaking more than one language, within the European Union, Hungary is left behind, according to the latest Eurobarometer survey. In this paper we will highlight some of the facts and problems undermining real multilingualism in Hungary.

This paper describes gender as a sociocultural construct and explores the ways in which this affects mass culture. This is discussed from a sociolinguistic perspective. The first section describes the relationship between language and culture using the Whorfian hypothesis. A link to gender issues is provided. The next section gives the two senses of gender, and a further distinction between gender and sex. This distinction is important because the anti- feminist movement campaigners would usually want to gloss over this or dismiss the gender issue altogether. The third section discusses the relationship between gender, culture and language. Gender is seen as a sociocultural construct, and this is overtly expressed through language. We note that gender is not only about biological and cultural differences, but also about power. This gives rise to salient issues of subjectivity and oppression, and the need for emancipation. Before change can ever be achieved, a critical exposure has to be done of these salient features. This leads to the fourth section, which examines how gender bias is encoded in our everyday language in various ways. All these are analyzed with their implications for language planning, which is the focus of the last section. (The Journal of Cultural Studies: 2001 3(2): 333-347)

Currently, European education systems, aware of need to know how to use languages, are developing bilingual and even multilingual programs, thus promoting research in the field of teaching and learning of foreign languages. In recent studies, the affectiveemotional aspects are emphasized, especially linguistic anxiety. The main objective of the present study is to measure the levels of linguistic anxiety of 519 students in Aragon (Spain) with the Spanish version of the FLCA scale (Perez and Martinez, 2001). From 1st to 4th of Secondary in the study of the French foreign language. According to the statistic the results show significant differences between boys and girls, depending on the gender, the teaching method of French (elective / bilingual) and the support, or not, in the study of the language.

Acts of politeness in the language of computing revolution revolution 4.0 makes it easy to communicate. The problem is the use of language in communication on social media pay less attention to the politeness aspects of communication. Language studies in political discourse so far are still separate. This means that the assessment has not yet included the accompanying political context. Therefore it is important to do politopragmatic studies, namely the integration of linguistic and political studies. This study aims to describe the forms of immodesty commenting on Instagram account followers' coverage6. The data used in this study are comments from Instagram account followers6 reporting that violates the principle of politeness. The source of data in this study is the comments of Instagram account followers. The data collection in this study was carried out by the documentation method, and was able to observe competent free (SBLC) and proceed with the note taking technique. Analysis of the data in this study uses the extralingual method. The results of this study indicate the impoliteness of commenting on Instagram social media is realized by violating the maxim of praise, maxim of wisdom, and maxim of generosity. The most maxim violation is the maxim of praise. This shows that followers of Instagram account coverage6 use a lot of comments that are condemned, insulting, and cornering the speech partners and give little praise to the speech partners.

Book Review: Linguistic Change: An Introduction to the Historical Study of Language

This paper sketches a comparison between the concepts of the subjectivity in Chomsky’s and Saussure’s language theory. This is important for two principal reasons. First, the current debate in cognitive sciences requires a reflection to be made in the different sciences that are geared towards this paradigm; second, the subjectivity notion and its relative definition, as an object of study, represents the key of the stone arch in the theory of cognitive sciences. The inquiry on the role of the subject in the language studies can contribute to the debate of social and biological aspects in human. Furthermore, linguistic study have always had an important relationship with cognitive science, because both share a fundamental difficulty due to the complexity of their object of study and of the finding of appropriate research methods.

Text reuse is the act of borrowing text (either verbatim or paraphrased) from an earlier written text. It could occur within the same language (mono-lingual) or across languages (cross-lingual) where the reused text is in a different language than the original text. Text reuse and its related problem, plagiarism (the unacknowledged reuse of text), are becoming serious issues in many fields and research shows that paraphrased and especially the cross-lingual cases of reuse are much harder to detect. Moreover, the recent rise in readily available multi-lingual content on the Web and social media has increased the problem to an unprecedented scale. To develop, compare, and evaluate automatic methods for mono- and crosslingual text reuse and extrinsic (finding portion(s) of text that is reused from the original text) plagiarism detection, standard evaluation resources are of utmost importance. However, previous efforts on developing such resources have mostly focused on English and some other languages. On the other hand, the Urdu language, which is widely spoken and has a large digital footprint, lacks resources in terms of core language processing tools and corpora. With this consideration in mind, this PhD research focuses on developing standard evaluation corpora, methods, and supporting resources to automatically detect mono-lingual (Urdu) and cross-lingual (English-Urdu) cases of text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism This thesis contributes a mono-lingual (Urdu) text reuse corpus (COUNTER Corpus) that contains real cases of Urdu text reuse at document-level. Another contribution is the development of a mono-lingual (Urdu) extrinsic plagiarism corpus (UPPC Corpus) that contains simulated cases of Urdu paraphrase plagiarism. Evaluation results, by applying a wide range of state-of-the-art mono-lingual methods on both corpora, shows that it is easier to detect verbatim cases than paraphrased ones. Moreover, the performance of these methods decreases considerably on real cases of reuse. A couple of supporting resources are also created to assist methods used in the cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse detection. A large-scale multi-domain English-Urdu parallel corpus (EUPC-20) that contains parallel sentences is mined from the Web and several bi-lingual (English-Urdu) dictionaries are compiled using multiple approaches from different sources. Another major contribution of this study is the development of a large benchmark cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse corpus (TREU Corpus). It contains English to Urdu real cases of text reuse at the document-level. A diversified range of methods are applied on the TREU Corpus to evaluate its usefulness and to show how it can be utilised in the development of automatic methods for measuring cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse. A new cross-lingual method is also proposed that uses bilingual word embeddings to estimate the degree of overlap amongst text documents by computing the maximum weighted cosine similarity between word pairs. The overall low evaluation results indicate that it is a challenging task to detect crosslingual real cases of text reuse, especially when the language pairs have unrelated scripts, i.e., English-Urdu. However, an improvement in the result is observed using a combination of methods used in the experiments. The research work undertaken in this PhD thesis contributes corpora, methods, and supporting resources for the mono- and cross-lingual text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism for a significantly under-resourced Urdu and English-Urdu language pair. It highlights that paraphrased and cross-lingual cross-script real cases of text reuse are harder to detect and are still an open issue. Moreover, it emphasises the need to develop standard evaluation and supporting resources for under-resourced languages to facilitate research in these languages. The resources that have been developed and methods proposed could serve as a framework for future research in other languages and language pairs.

One of those features that set human societies apart from animal societies is the use of language. Language is a vital part of every human culture and is a powerful social tool that we master at an early age. A second feature of humans is our ability to solve complex problems. For centuries philosophers have questioned whether these two abilities are related and, if so, what the nature of the relationship between language and thought is. At the beginning of the last century psychologists joined this debate and it is a topic that is currently generating a lot of research. Another factor in the study of language and thought is the role of culture. When we study a language from another country we see that it is not just the words and grammar that are different but the customs and traditions as well. Even the ideas of that culture and the way of dealing with life can be different. There are a number of views on the nature of the relationship between language and thought. But here we are going to explore one of those views, the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH), concerning that the language a speaker uses influences the way the speaker thinks.