Re-examining the mass-count distinction

The first-person pronouns in Bahasa Indonesia have two forms: singular and plural. The singular pronoun forms are saya and aku for the singular pronoun forms, while the plural pronoun forms for the first-person are kita and kami. This paper aims to figure out the highest number of both singular and plural forms in Bahasa Indonesia, the number of the first-person singular pronouns form aku and saya, and the number of the plural pronouns for first-person forms kami and kita. The corpus linguistic method is applied in this research. Using corpus software, vis. AntConc 3.5.8 tool, the pronouns aku, saya, kita, and kami were identified. The 8,432,978 tokens were obtained from four different sources: newspapers, magazines, short stories, and novels. From the number of collected tokens, 224,796 corpora were classified as singular and plural pronouns. The result of the research shows that 1) the amount of the singular pronoun for the first-person is higher than the plural form; 2) the quantity of the singular pronoun form for the first-person aku is higher than saya; and 3) the usage of the plural pronoun of the first-person forms kami is higher than kita established in the four sources of the corpus. AbstrakPronomina orang pertama di dalam bahasa Indonesia memiliki dua bentuk: tunggal dan jamak. Bentuk pronomina tunggal adalah saya dan aku, sedangkan bentuk jamaknya adalah kita dan kami. Tujuan penelitian ini mendeskripsikan pronomina yang memiliki jumlah terbanyak yang berbentuk tunggal dan jamak dalam bahasa Indonesia, baik pronomina orang pertama berbentuk tunggal saya dan aku serta pronomina orang pertama yang berbentuk jamak kami dan kita. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode linguistik korpus. Dengan menggunakan perangkat lunak korpus, vis. aplikasi AntConc 3.5.8, kata ganti aku, saya, kita, dan kami diidentifikasi. Sebanyak 8.432.978 token yang berasal dari koran, majalah, cerita pendek, dan novel digunakan sebagai data penelitian ini. Dari sejumlah token tersebut, 224.796 korpus diklasifikasikan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa 1) jumlah pronomina orang pertama tunggal lebih banyak dari pronomina orang pertama jamak; 2) penggunaan pronomina aku lebih banyak dari saya; dan 3) dari empat sumber korpus yang digunakan dilaporkan bahwa penggunaan pronomina orang pertama jamak kami lebih banyak dari kita.

This paper proposes a pair of morphosyntactic number features, [Discrete] and [Non-Atomic], and shows how they can contribute to an understanding of how grammatical number is expressed cross-linguistically. Starting with English, where mass nominals pattern syncretically sometimes with plural count nominals and sometimes with singular ones, we use these features to improve upon a previous account (Cowper & Hall 2002), and then extend the analysis to mass–count syncretisms in Lingala and Manam and to classifiers in Western Armenian and Mandarin. We account for the crosslinguistic variation using a consistent set of features and a highly constrained theory of morphological exponence, and argue that the variation arises from differences in the syntactic structures in which the features appear and the paradigmatic systems of contrast in which they participate.

As our goal in this book is to generate a wide range of lexical variants from the same underlying representation, we first of all need to investigate more closely the notion of ‘paraphrase’, and then to delimit the range of variation to be produced in our system. A central idea of our project is to see multilingual generation as a mere extension of the monolingual paraphrase task and to devise the system architecture accordingly: Rephrasing an English sentence with different English words should in principle not be different from rephrasing that same sentence with German words. Obviously, this stance is more difficult to defend when looking at less closely related languages, but for our purposes here we stick to English and German, occasionally looking at other languages for interesting examples. Therefore, we develop the following overview of lexical variation by looking at both paraphrases within a single language (Section 3.1) and differences between languages, the so-called divergences (Section 3.2). Then, Section 3.3 points out the commonalities between the two and argues that from the viewpoint of MLG there should not be a fundamental difference between them.

<p>Recently there has been an increase in the number of students learning Mandarin Chinese (in mainland China and internationally). This increase has led to speculation that Mandarin Chinese is becoming a mainstream global language to the point of becoming a <em>lingua franca</em>. This paper utilizes research findings from different regions and focal points and argues that Mandarin Chinese could be accepted as a <em>lingua franca </em>within some contexts, but is unlikely to do so in others. It argues that Mandarin Chinese is generally accepted as the <em>lingua franca</em> of China and a possible <em>lingua franca</em> within the East Asian region, while unlikely to become a <em>lingua franca</em> globally. The paper compares a number of different reasons for studying Mandarin Chinese by different stakeholders (i.e. governments, school boards, individual students) as well as comparative numbers of language learners. This paper also examines if Mandarin is the dominant and undisputed form of global Chinese. It concludes by demonstrating that there is a greater need for further research into Mandarin Chinese as a <em>lingua franca</em>.</p>

This paper studies personal pronouns and their derived forms as ideological discourse features. The aim is to identify, compare and contrast these pronominal forms within speech acts used in the speeches delivered by two presidential candidates of two ideologically opposed political parties (Speech 1 and Speech 2) to establish whether their syntactic style reflects their ideologi­cal world view, divides or unites the electorate around a com­mon goal as well as whether the speeches fit in the “ideological square” (van Dijk 1998, 2008). The methodology draws on criti­cal discourse analysis and the speech act theory. This analysis first shows the occurrence of personal, possessive and reflexive pronouns and adjectives and changes in their referents within speech acts and verbs and verbal tenses. We concluded that the speeches did not follow the principle of van Dijk’s “ideologi­cal square”, since we did not find the opposition of the collec­tive “us” and “them”. However, the ideological difference was observed in the speakers’ choice of the pronoun “you”, in the division of the electorate and in the number of directives ad­dressed to the audience – a higher number in S1, and, on the other hand, indirect directives and call for cooperation and uni­ty of the whole nation in S2. The ideological opposition was also detectable in their choice of speech acts and verbal forms, i. e. whether the speaker was more prone to promising, both in singular and plural form in S1, which could be interpreted as a populist move, or to stating some wishes in the singular form, suggesting a more cautious approach, as in S2.

We present a complexity-entropy analysis of word co-occurrence networks built from a parallel corpus of 360 languages spanning diverse typological and geographical groups. Each network represents words as nodes and bigram relations as edges. To capture structural organization, we measure permutation entropy and statistical complexity using the Bandt-Pompe ordinal pattern method, and lexical entropy using the Nemenman-Shafee-Bialek estimator. Language networks cluster in a compact region of the complexity-entropy plane, with consistently low values, clearly distinct from randomized Erdős-Rényi baselines. A negative correlation emerges between lexical and permutation entropy: greater vocabulary diversity tends to coincide with more ordered, less random token sequences. This shift suggests that languages expand their lexical space while reinforcing sequential structure. Family-level comparisons highlight systematic differences: Quechuan and Turkic languages combine high lexical entropy with low permutation entropy, Mayan languages show the reverse pattern, and Panoan and Tupian occupy intermediate positions. These results reveal a robust trade-off between lexical diversity and ordinal structure that supports efficient communication.

Footwear and its various models are primarily the subject of study in merchandising; however, for linguistics, it is an equally interesting object of research in synchronous and diachronic aspects. In particular, the grammatical characteristics of footwear nouns have not yet been the subject of separate research. The plural form of the noun ʻfootwearʼ is more commonly used in modern linguistic practice, determined by the significance, for human existence, of the semantics of a com- plete pair of footwear. The singular form of the noun name ʻfootwearʼ is less common, as it disrupts the integrity of the concept of a ʻfootwear pairʼ with the semantics of an ʻindi vi- dualizedʼ object. The choice of the number form of footwear nouns as a register is deter- mined by different principles of compiling lexicographical publications and their distinct purposes: explanatory dictionaries prioritize the meaning of an unanalyzed plural, while re- gis ters prioritize the plural form of the noun expressing the semantics of a type of footwear. In orthographic dictionaries, the indication of another numerical form represents the inflec- tional component of the number category of fixed nouns in this semantic group. The grammatical significance of the number in the core of footwear names consists of nouns with a numeral pair, where the codification of the singular form is conditioned by the proportional origin of lexemes and the completion of the grammatical assimilation of foreigh lexemes. Lexicographical sources inconsistently record the singular form of footwear nouns from the core sphere. The change in the grammatical qualification of some footwear names from ʻpluralia tantumʼ to ʻgrammatical significance of singular and pluralʼ attests to the dynamics of morphological norms in contemporary Ukrainian language in general and the process of grammatical adaptation of predominantly foreigh lexemes in particular. However, more often, discrepancies in the printed and ele ctronic dictionaries regarding the grammatical number of nouns from the core sphere of footwear (either plural nouns or nouns with a numeral pair) are caused by subjective factors. The periphery consists of ʻpluralia tantumʼ nouns, most of which are of foreign origin and only make up a part of the lexical composition of the Ukrainian language. The infre- quent functioning of singular forms of nouns from the peripheral sphere in modern speech indicates the incompleteness of their grammatical adaptation. Predominantly foreigh foot- wear names that are not represented in any of the analyzed dictionaries reside outside the delineated spheres, and their use in the plural form in the texts of the 16th version of the Ukrainian National Corpus (HRAK) and in advertising posts on the social network ʻInstagramʼ illustrate the beginning of grammatical adaptation to the morphological norms of the modern Ukrainian language. We see the perspective of research in studying the dynamics of grammatical assimila- tion primarily of those footwear names that are only included in the lexical system of the Ukrainian language and have the grammatical status of ʻpluralia tantumʼ nouns, predomi- nantly used in modern speech either exclusively or mostly in the plural form, with the sin- gular form of these nouns not recorded in any lexicographical publication. The observa- tion of changes in the grammatical number of those footwear names whose singular form is not codified, as it is inconsistently represented in dictionaries, also remains relevant. Keywords: number category, noun, footwear name, pluralia tantum, nu me ral pair, parsed plu- ral, unparsed plural, dynamics, dictionary.

A prominent claim made in the theory of natural morphology is that among morphological processes, affixation is more “natural” than internal stem changes. According to this theory, the criteria for “more natural” include the following: more common in the world's languages; more common within a single language; easier to acquire, and thus acquired earlier; later lost in aphasia; and easier to process in general. This chapter compares explanations traced to grammaticization with explanations based on synchronic processing preferences. It argues that the rarity of stem changes versus affixes in the languages of the world is due to the way each mode of expression develops diachronically and not to a postulated extra processing cost for stem changes. The acquisition difficulty associated with stem changes is due to their low type frequency in the languages in which they have been studied. This chapter describes an experiment in which subjects were taught an artificial language in which stem changes have type frequency comparable to affixes. In this experiment, subjects learned the stem changes as easily as the affixes.

The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within dialectology/dialectometry. First, rather than assuming a fixed and incomplete set of variants, we use Computational Construction Grammar to provide a replicable and falsifiable set of syntactic features. Second, rather than assuming a specific area of interest, we use global language mapping based on web-crawled and social media datasets to determine the selection of national varieties. Third, rather than looking at a single language in isolation, we model seven major languages together using the same methods: Arabic, English, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Results show that models for each language are able to robustly predict the region-of-origin of held-out samples better using Construction Grammars than using simpler syntactic features. These global-scale experiments are used to argue that new methods in computational sociolinguistics are able to provide more generalized models of regional variation that are essential for understanding language variation and change at scale.

Taking a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective, this book explores how language builds our knowledge about the past and gives value to historical events, thereby shaping contemporary culture. It brings together cutting-edge research from an international team of scholars to provide a detailed study of texts from three different world languages (English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese) – revealing how the discourse of history is constructed in these languages. Each chapter provides examples and step-by-step analyses of how knowledge and value are constructed in history texts, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics to develop theory and description in relation to text analysis. It also makes connections with disciplinary literacy and history education, showing how linguistic findings can benefit the teaching and learning of historical literacy. Providing theoretical and analytical foundations for studies of the discourse of history, it is essential reading for anyone interested in literacy, discourse analysis, and language description.

This paper discusses a group of Brazilian Portuguese plurals that end with the nasal diphthong [–ão] in their singular form. When pluralized, these words can take three plural forms: [–ões], [–ãos], or [–ães]. Each of these words has an etymological source that defines which morpheme should be applied to the plural form. However, in some cases, a different plural form is used instead of the etymological one. A set of psycholinguistic experiments was carried out with Brazilian Portuguese speakers. The goal was to analyze whether token or type frequency affects the choice of plural form for these words. The results show an interaction between type and token frequency, in the sense that type frequency serves as the basis for analogy, and token frequency can determine which words will be affected by the variation.

Lexical complexity, generally understood as a multidimensional construct consisting of lexical density, sophistication, and diversity, has been recognized as an important construct in first language acquisition and second language acquisition. A large variety of lexical complexity measures have been proposed by researchers to study its relationship to second language learners’ writing and/or speaking proficiency. While this line of research has generated fruitful results for languages such as English and other Indo-European languages, less is known about how it may be applicable to a typologically distance language such as Chinese. In this paper, we report the design of a computational tool for automating the measurement of lexical complexity with 25 indices. The Batch Mode of the software supports analyses of a large number of .txt files and outputs results to a .CSV file suitable for importation into statistical packages for further analyses. In an example application, we analyzed 87 texts from three distinct registers (academic prose, fiction, and press reportage) from the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (McEnery and Xiao, The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese: A corpus for monolingual and contrastive language study, in Proc. Fourth Int. Conf. Language Resources and Evaluation, eds. M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa and R. Silva, (European Language Resources Association, Paris, 2014), pp. 1175–1178) and explored how register variation may manifest in lexical complexity. The ANOVA analyses showed linear increase in multiple lexical sophistication and diversity measures across academic prose, fiction and press reportage. The results showed that press reportage has lower lexical density, but higher lexical sophistication and diversity than academic prose; fiction also has higher lexical diversity than academic prose. This paper concluded with discussions of potential pedagogical applications for Chinese language teaching and learning.

Acquisition of Russian Nominal Case Inflections by Monolingual Children: A Psycholinguistic Approach

Hebrew speakers cannot address directly individuals within a group. This derives from the prevalent use of the second person plural masculine form, which abandons individuals’ identity. The use of masculine form as a default makes it especially difficult for females. These psycho logical characteristics of Hebrew require individual listeners within a group to process an instantaneous correction: males, from plural form to singular and females, from plural to singular and from masculine to female. Two reaction time (RT) experiments were purported to examine cognitive implications of these characteristics for speakers of Hebrew as L1. Each participant was required to respond promptly to a series of 60 nouns in Hebrew, equally divided between second person singular and second person plural male form. In Experiment 1 it took longer for each of the 57 adults (30 men, 27 women) to respond to the second person plural masculine form. Women’s RT in such conditions was longer. Experiment 2 found a similar trend, with greater RT, in 5 - 6-year-old children (15 boys and 15 girls). A new sub-field of cognitive research, which can be called “Psycho logical incompatibility” or “Corrective language processing”, is suggested, depending on future support for the present findings.

Global programming language is a special instrument, which will initially be created to solve the problem of code translation between programming languages. It will allow users to conveniently and error-free translate code from one language to another. Therefore, its grammar will be developed based on the condition of maximum convenience of unification of source texts of programs implemented in different paradigms. Also Global programming language has a lot of advantages. It is a universal entry point for learning programming. All programs can be run on any device by translating the source code into a language supported by a particular device. There is no need to choose one programming language to implement the entire project. It becomes possible to write various blocks of code in the most convenient languages and then automatically translate result into a single target language.