Optimizing Adverb Positions

We investigated the retention of surface linguistic information during reading using eye-tracking. Departing from a research tradition that examines differences between meaning retention and verbatim memory, we focused on how different linguistic factors affect the retention of surface linguistic information. We examined three grammatical alternations in German that differed in involvement of changes in morpho-syntax and/or information structure, while their propositional meaning is unaffected: voice (active vs. passive), adverb positioning, different realizations of conditional clauses. Single sentences were presented and repeated, either identical or modified according to the grammatical alternation (with controlled interval between them). Results for native (N = 60) and non-native (N = 58) German participants show longer fixation durations for modified versus unmodified sentences when information structural changes are involved (voice, adverb position). In contrast, mere surface grammatical changes without a functional component (conditional clauses) did not lead to different reading behavior. Sensitivity to the manipulation was not influenced by language (L1, L2) or repetition interval. The study provides novel evidence that linguistic factors affect verbatim retention and highlights the importance of eye-tracking as a sensitive measure of implicit memory.

This paper presents a contrastive study of modal adverbs in English and French, with a focus on a few pairs such as évidemment vs. ‘obviously’, apparemment vs. ‘apparently’. The relation between inference and epistemic modality is discussed both semantically and syntactically. Modal adverbs license double modality in French, in contrast to their English counterparts. This different syntactic behaviour confirms that the distinction that is generally made between two modal functions — the identificative one and the restrictive one — is relevant to French modal adverbs, but not to English modal adverbs. However, this semantic difference needs to be revisited and backed up pragmatically. It is argued that the identificative function of modal adverbs should be redefined in terms of intersubjectivity. While ‘apparently’ and ‘obviously’ mark the speaker’s identification with the addressee’s point of view, apparemment and évidemment are shown to be able to express the speaker’s evaluation whatever the speaker and addressee’s common knowledge might be. This pragmatic difference in turn provides an explanation for the different constraints on the use of modal adverbs in English and French.

In research on information structure and discourse cohesion, contrast has been defined in different ways, depending on the pragmatic/semantic relation established between the propositions involved in the contrast, on the text types and on other discourse conditions. As a whole, despite – or possibly because of – its vagueness, contrast has proved to be a useful heuristic tool for characterizing discourse cohesion phenomena. This paper focuses on results from our research concerning cohesion phenomena in elicited discourse in Romance (Italian, French) and Germanic (German, Dutch) languages and aims to offer a more precise characterization of contrast against several variation parameters. We take into consideration earlier work on three tasks (Finite Story, Polarity-Switch Dialogues, Map Task) and add a new one (Spot the Difference). The comparison between the results allows us to disentangle the following variables: information units involved in the contrast relation; discourse conditions (monologue vs. dialogue); speakers’ access to information (shared vs. non-shared); effect of contrast on information in the common ground (alternative maintained vs. rejected). The aim is to achieve a more fine-grained definition of contrast relations, which allows us to identify and characterize the divergent behavior of Romance and Germanic languages, and to relate intra- and crosslinguistic differences revealed by speakers’ preferences in speech with structural specificities of the two language groups.

Fuzzy sets theory provides a good theoretical basis to represent imprecision of the information, at different levels of representation. It constitutes an unified framework for representing and processing both numerical and symbolic information, as well as structural information (constituted mainly by spatial relationships in image processing). We show that this theory can achieve tasks at several levels, from low level (e.g. grey-level based classification) to high level (e.g. model based structural pattern recognition and scene interpretation). We describe the use of fuzzy set at low level, for processing the basic numerical information contained in the images. Then we go to the object level, and show how to represent objects or structures in the images as fuzzy objects, and we present some operations on such fuzzy objects. At higher level, we are concerned by structural information and spatial relationships between objects, as distances, adjacency, and relative position between fuzzy objects. Finally, we address the problem of combining and fusing information. We show examples at low level for multi-source classification, and at high level for recognition of brain structures based on an atlas.

Three English adverbs and their formal equivalents in Romance languages<BR> A corpus-based collocational study

This chapter is about the meanings of emotion words in everyday language. It employs a well-established approach to semantic description, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which depicts meanings using paraphrases composed of simple, cross-translatable words. Numerous NSM studies have investigated emotion vocabulary in diverse languages. In broad agreement with many emotion theorists, the picture emerging from this research is that emotion words depict blends of feelings and thoughts, sometimes accompanied by potential bodily reactions. Using examples from English and German, the chapter summarises findings about the semantics of emotion words of various kinds, including adjectives (e.g., afraid, angry, ashamed), verbs (e.g., miss, worry), and abstract nouns (e.g., happiness, depression). Considerable weight is placed on linguistic evidence such as usage patterns, collocational data, and phraseology. It is shown that the NSM methodology makes it possible to differentiate between similar-but-different emotion concepts in a single language, e.g., English happy, pleased, satisfied, between comparable words in different languages, e.g., German Ekel versus English disgust, and, where historical records are available, to trace how emotion words may change their meanings over time.

Code clones, which are defined as fragments of code sharing logical similarities, present significant challenges in software maintenance and debugging. While existing methods focus on clones within a single programming language, the growing prevalence of multilanguage programming necessitates identifying clones across diverse languages. Recent research studies for cross-language clone detection utilized the Syntax Trees (ASTs) to analyze code fragments; yet their limitations in capturing comprehensive structural and semantic information reduce the effectiveness of previous approaches, especially in identifying negative clone instances. Consequently, existing literature approaches exhibit high recall but low precision, impacting model performance in real-world clone detection. In this paper, we present Enhanced Syntax Trees (EASTs) that incorporate innovative condition type edges along with control flow edges to effectively capture both structural and semantic aspects of code information. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are utilized to generate feature vectors that capture the relationships and dependencies among the nodes of EASTs. Experimental results showcase our approach’s effectiveness in detecting positive and negative code clones across Java and Python fragments. With recall, precision, and F1 scores of 0.98, 0.92, and 0.94, respectively, our method outperforms current state-of-the art techniques and commonly used Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) models in cross-language clone detection.

The study explores how translation can be used as part of pedagogical translanguaging to facilitate multilingual learners’ understanding of the way tempo-aspecutal meanings are conveyed. Two sets of data are analysed, focusing on tense-aspect marking: (1) a novel excerpt originally written in Italian is compared with its professional translations in Romance (French, Spanish) and Germanic (English, German) languages; (2) retranslations from these languages to Italian, provided by L1 speakers of Italian and learners of Italian with French, Spanish and German as their L1 are compared with each other and with the original Italian text. Professional translations provide a window to crosslinguistic variation in the use of tense-aspect marking and to complex linguistic phenomena such as the aoristic drift in Romance languages. Retranslations from these languages back to Italian capture some differences in the way speakers develop a tempo-aspectual representation of situations. Similar analyses, guided by the teacher, can be conducted in multilingual classrooms as part of pedagogical translanguaging. Analysing the same text passage in multiple languages and engaging in its retranslations fosters crosslinguistic awareness and promotes joint exploration and co-construction of linguistic knowledge.

This article discusses the new approaches to dating the origins of the Romance languages having appeared as a consequence of the thesis of R. Wright -wich broke with the theory of two traditionally accepted norms postulating one single language up to the Carolingian reforms- while surveying studies originated by the thesis, its degree of acceptance and some of the major objections which have been raised.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the ways in which children from immigrant backgrounds view the place of ‘other’ languages in primary schools in France and England. This article draws on findings from a cross-national ethnographic study, which investigated the experiences of 10- and 11-year-old children of immigrants in two primary schools, one in France and one in England. It shows how, in both schools, children had to negotiate the symbolic domination of a single legitimate language and viewed their other languages as inferior, undesirable or illicit. Building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, findings in this paper contribute insights into the complex debates around language diversity, multilingualism and intercultural communication in schools in France and England.

Article Wiltrud Mihatsch / Inga Hennecke / Anna Kisiel / Alena Kolyaseva / Kristin Davidse / Lieselotte Brems (eds.): Type Noun Constructions in Slavic, Germanic and Romance Languages. Semantics and Pragmatics on the Move was published on December 1, 2025 in the journal Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (volume 23, issue 46).

This paper focuses on a problem which has been the object of numerous studies centered mainly on Germanic languages, and which concerns general linguistics : determining to what extent the meaning of a derivative can be predicted from the meaning of the base. The author attempts to answer this question by taking the Romagnese dialect as an example. By observing 232 Romagnol deverbatives (corresponding to pairs of verbs derived from a single noun with variations in the prefix), it was possible to establish that the meaning of 76% of them can be predicted from the base noun. The main causes of idiosyncrasy are : flaws in the lexical system (homonymy, polysemy), the phenomenon of transference of denomination (metaphor, metonymy), chance events linked to the history of lexicon (modification of originally regular meaning, introduction of units from other systems, etc.). This relatively high rate of readability seems to correct the somewhat chaotic view on derivation proposed by English and American linguists and to accord with the conclusions of scholars (Rainer, Corbin) who have measured the semantic predictability of derivatives in Romance languages

Word order correlates with distinctions of information structure, and Gunther Grewendorf’s work has contributed much to our understanding of what the pertinent regularities are in German and other languages such as Italian or Japanese, and it has also shaped our understanding of how these regularities are linked to grammar. Grewendorf (1980) constitutes one of the first concrete proposals of capturing the impact of informational distinctions on German word order. Grewendorf and Sabel (1994, 1999) developed one of the most detailed models of word order variation in the middle field. Grewendorf has also contributed substantially to recent developments concerning the left periphery of clauses, based on the view that categories like focus and topic are directly represented in the syntax. Rizzi (1997) proposed that there are Topic and Focus heads situated in the higher functional layers of the clauses, and that the specifiers of these heads host topic and focus phrases, respectively if not already in the surface representation, then at least at LF. Rizzi’s view has been elaborated for German by Frey (2004), Haftka (1995), Pili (2000), and, of course, Grewendorf (2005a,b). Such approaches in which information structure is directly coded in the syntax constitute one of two extreme ends of a continuum of models of the syntax-information structure interaction. Correlations between positions and informational functions do not necessarily imply that information structure and word order are directly related by syntactic laws. Rather, informational concepts might be correlated with other properties of phrases (say, their length), which could then be the ones really affected by the forces determining word order, such as processability, see, e.g., Hawkins (1994) for such a view.1 In this paper, I will argue that information structure concepts indeed do not play an immediate role in syntax. While word order can reflect information structure categories, it does so because these categories are encoded phonologically in a certain form (or because of the semantic consequences of information structure distinctions) to which

Cross-linguistic differences in gender congruency effects: Evidence from meta-analyses

The research aims to explore the etymology and semantic field of the zoonym “cow” in the linguocultural contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families. The article analyzes the origin of the word “cow” in Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, identifying its core and additional meanings, commonalities and specific features. This analysis makes it possible to determine the national characteristics in the expression of knowledge about people, animals, and the world in mythological and religious beliefs by the native speakers. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering the zoonym “cow” not only as a linguistic object, but also as a cultural phenomenon intertwined with history, mythology, religion, and human lifestyle. This zoonym is studied for the first time in a comparative aspect using data from Slavic, Turkic, Romance and Germanic languages, with the aim of identifying, analyzing, and describing national cultural features, similarities, and differences. As a result, the study proves that the etymology and semantics of the word “cow” in the contexts of the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic language families display shared roots, dating back to a distant past, and indicate profound connections between the peoples. Despite some differences among the peoples who speak Slavic and Turkic languages, such as national specificity of worldview, varying living conditions, traditions, history, and religion, the words designating the cow in various linguocultures are part of a unified history, connected to the use of this animal in human life.