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AbstractThe concept of regions has long been crucial for understanding and managing Earth’s phenomena, leading to regionalization, aggregating smaller areas into larger, contiguous, and homogeneous regions to achieve specific goals. Open-source regionalization is gaining traction because it reduces dependence on commercial software and fosters wider adoption in analysis and decision-making. However, these packages, often designed by experts for specialized tasks, can be challenging to understand and utilize due to domain-specific jargon and functionalities, especially for unfamiliar users. A prevalent disconnect must be addressed: How can we make a complex optimization approach available to a broad audience with various backgrounds? This study introduces RegionDefiner, a Large Language Modeling (LLM)-powered conversational agent, to comprehensively understand the functionality, inputs, outputs, and potential applications of regionalization problems. We selected it as an illustrative example due to its wide-ranging potential for delineating study regions in various applications. RegionDefiner is designed to guide users in framing their problems, collecting necessary data, and implementing solution approaches in a straightforward and user-centric manner. The experiments demonstrate that RegionDefiner interprets and presents the results in an understandable way for all audiences, thus bridging the gap between intricate computations and practical problem-solving needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the treatment of Australian slang within the context of lexicography, in particular focusing on the way in which the Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and Their Origins (first edition, 1988, second edition, 2016, online edition forthcoming) has dealt with slang. It places this treatment within the broader context of debates and discussions around Australian slang, as well as considering the treatment of slang by other English-language dictionaries, primarily those based on historical principles. It explains the decisions made around the treatment of slang and colloquial language in the Australian National Dictionary. These decisions were as much informed by the ways in which Australian slang has been constructed and shaped by cultural discourses, myths, and perceptions as by any objective categorization of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intelligent customer service conversations between customer and customer service agent exhibit characteristics such as serious colloquialism, a high diversity of words, and short text length, making traditional sentiment analysis algorithms less effective. Besides, relying solely on coarse-grained sentiment analysis could not fully display the text information of users in the dialogue, resulting in poor performance of sentiment classification prediction. To address these issues, this paper introduces a hybrid word embedding method (HWE) based on Gaussian distribution to leverage the emotional syntactic and semantic richness of the two distributed word representations (Word2Vec, and GloVe). Additionally, a stacked ensemble method is employed, combining outputs from three deep learning models—Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). This ensemble approach enables simultaneous prediction of both coarse-grained and fine-grained sentiment analysis for intelligent customer service conversation text. The results show that HWE method enhances the comprehension of word representations in the context of conversations, leading to more effective sentiment analysis. Furthermore, the proposed stacked ensemble model outperforms current state-of-the-art single-task models, showcasing a significant improvement in sentiment classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of cross-target stance detection faces significant challenges due to the lack of additional background information in emerging knowledge domains and the colloquial nature of language patterns. Traditional stance detection methods often struggle with understanding limited context and have insufficient generalization across diverse sentiments and semantic structures. This paper focuses on effectively mining and utilizing sentiment-semantics knowledge for stance knowledge transfer and proposes a sentiment-aware hierarchical attention network (SentiHAN) for cross-target stance detection. SentiHAN introduces an improved hierarchical attention network designed to maximize the use of high-level representations of targets and texts at various fine-grain levels. This model integrates phrase-level combinatorial sentiment knowledge to effectively bridge the knowledge gap between known and unknown targets. By doing so, it enables a comprehensive understanding of stance representations for unknown targets across different sentiments and semantic structures. The model’s ability to leverage sentiment-semantics knowledge enhances its performance in detecting stances that may not be directly observable from the immediate context. Extensive experimental results indicate that SentiHAN significantly outperforms existing benchmark methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness. Moreover, the paper employs ablation studies and visualization techniques to explore the intricate relationship between sentiment and stance. These analyses further confirm the effectiveness of sentence-level combinatorial sentiment knowledge in improving stance detection capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWith the proliferation of AI conversational agents, the design of preset prompts—text suggestions that guide user interactions—has become crucial for enhancing user experience. This study investigates the impact of different preset prompt language styles (social-oriented vs. task-oriented) on user satisfaction. Utilizing two empirical studies, we examined how these language styles influence user perceptions of an AI agent’s warmth and competence, and how these perceptions mediate overall satisfaction. In the first study, participants interacted with an AI agent using either social-oriented or task-oriented prompts under conditions of service success or failure. The results indicated that social-oriented prompts significantly enhance user satisfaction by increasing perceptions of warmth, but not competence. However, this positive effect diminishes in the event of service failure. In the second study, we explored the moderating effect of task urgency. Findings revealed that the positive impact of social-oriented prompts on satisfaction is significant in low-urgency tasks but not in high-urgency scenarios. These insights underscore the importance of prompt language style in AI interactions and provide practical implications for designing more effective AI communication strategies, especially in customer service contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the use of touch as a tool for engaging prospective next speakers within Indonesian multiparty conversation. We examine the lamination of touch onto questions directed towards specifically targeted recipients. First, we find that questions with touch are deployed when the physical environment complicates the attainment of mutual orientation. Second, when previously targeted recipients have failed to respond to a question, touch is added to follow-up questions that are deployed for pursuing a response. Third, touch is added to questions that are personal or that inquire about potentially delicate matters. This multimodal investigation of conversational turn-taking provides data from Colloquial Indonesian as basis for cross-linguistic comparison. In considering the volume of touches in these data we ask whether cultural and environmental factors might contribute to a haptic modification of ordinary turn-taking procedures. (Turn-taking, touch, multimodality, sociotopography) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the effects on early bilingualism on reading development is scarce. Here, we tackle this question by investigating whether the exposure to dual-language contexts (use of two languages in the same conversational situation) induces a boost in phonological and reading performance through more balanced spatial auditory attentional skills. Thirty Grade 1 early Spanish-Basque bilingual children predominantly exposed to dual-language contexts and 30 matched Spanish-Basque bilingual children predominantly exposed to single-language contexts were assessed on a dichotic listening task: syllables were simultaneously presented to the left and right ears and children were instructed to report the syllable they heard best. The dual-language contexts group demonstrated a reduced right ear advantage than the single-language contexts group, suggesting a more balanced report of syllables across ears in the former group. Moreover, more balanced reports were associated with more efficient reading skills. These results suggest that the frequent exposure to dual-language contexts possibly triggers the spatial rebalance of attentional resources for speech processing, impacting positively the development of reading skills. Future studies will determine whether some bilingual experience might act as a protective factor to reduce the prevalence and severity of future reading impairments such as dyslexia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many, putting in doubt the existence of phenomenal consciousness is absurd since the distinction between appearance and reality does not apply to it. Many cognitive scientists and neuroscientists accept the existence of consciousness in virtue of such reasoning. The present work questions that justification. Consciousness is a concept whose scientific meaning comes from philosophy or colloquial language. From this, it concludes that the “self-evident nature of consciousness” is not a scientifically valid statement. This philosophical assumption rests on a category mistake in scientific language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chat generative pretrained transformer (ChatGPT) is a conversational language model powered by artificial intelligence (AI). It is a sophisticated language model that employs deep learning methods to generate human-like text outputs to inputs in the natural language. This narrative review aims to shed light on ethical concerns about using AI models like ChatGPT in writing assistance in the health care and medical domains. Currently, all the AI models like ChatGPT are in the infancy stage; there is a risk of inaccuracy of the generated content, lack of contextual understanding, dynamic knowledge gaps, limited discernment, lack of responsibility and accountability, issues of privacy, data security, transparency, and bias, lack of nuance, and originality. Other issues such as authorship, unintentional plagiarism, falsified and fabricated content, and the threat of being red-flagged as AI-generated content highlight the need for regulatory compliance, transparency, and disclosure. If the legitimate issues are proactively considered and addressed, the potential applications of AI models as writing assistance could be rewarding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Middle East Journal for Humanities & Cultural Studies is the property of Manar Elsharq for Studies & Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Theory & Practice in Education (JTPE) / Eğitimde Kuram ve Uygulama is the property of Journal of Theory & Practice in Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper contextualizes Okudzhava's song "And We to the Doorman" (AWD), initially marginal in the Soviet poetic mainstream. It explores its shifts in tone, irregular rhythms, colloquial language, and semi-criminal undertones. AWD's structure, with uneven stanzas and no clear refrain, reveals underlying symmetry and recurring themes. The meter is predominantly iambic but varies. Unconventional verse endings and various rhyme schemes, including distant chains, characterize its prosody. The narrative touches on social cohesion and class conflict. The style reflects a challenging attitude toward privilege, employing rhetorical devices and indirect threats. The melody aligns with thematic elements, featuring repetitive patterns and a spoken quality. Semantically, AWD presents an ambiguous message on class struggle and moral issues. In sum, this analysis uncovers Okudzhava's song's formal complexities, thematic nuances, and stylistic innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the issue of language in psychiatry has been raised more frequently. The concern for choosing the appropriate words has resulted in developing language recommendations regarding the way we should speak about treating mental health disorders. The lexeme psychiatryk 'mental hospital' has been mentioned among words that contribute to preserving the negative stereotypes of psychiatric care. Thus, the paper focuses on the ways in which this word is evaluated across the Internet. Since the author analyses specific utterances - the ways language is used, she employs the framework of linguistic pragmatics to account for the broad context of each utterance (the speaker's intentions, utterance type, the assumed hearer, etc.). In the majority of the analysed cases, we can observe such uses of the words that uphold the negative stereotype of institutionalized psychiatric care, and the hospitals themselves (in examples that exhibit playfulness, bordering on colloquialism and derision) are represented as appalling, pathological or funny and incomprehensible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of globalization and adaptation to multiple cultures has emanated a fusion of Hindi and English, casually known as Hinglish. The phenomenon of mixing multiple languages (such as Hindi and English) within a single utterance is often called code-mixing. Lately, code-mixed Hinglish has emerged as a dominant conversational language for Hindi-speaking citizens both online (on social media platforms) and offline. Although previous studies investigated such linguistic traits of Hinglish over the past few years, some pertinent questions still need to be answered: How did Hinglish evolve? And, what are the factors behind the evolution of Hinglish? Does the fusion of English impact all Hindi words similarly? To this end, we explore the empirical and statistical shreds of evidence behind the rise of Hinglish on social media such as Twitter. We show that adopting Hinglish depends on several socio-economic and demographic factors. We further formulate dynamic models to explore the socio-economic factors driving the growth of Hinglish, derive the future growth of Hinglish in the upcoming years, and estimate the propensity of users to change their linguistic preferences. Our study highlights that the Hinglish population has evolved steadily between 2014 and 2022, with an annualized growth rate of 1.2%, and the usage of Hinglish on Twitter has increased annually by 2%. Further, we find that the impact of Hinglish evolution is not uniform across different word groups and affects the contextual meaning of different words differently. Although our findings are specific to the Indian Hinglish community, our study can be generalized to understand the evolution and dynamics of other code-mixed languages, such as Spanish-English or Chinese-English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of the book "Historical Pragmatics of Spanish: Forms of Address, Speech Acts, and Dialogue Construction". The book compiles contributions from specialists in historical pragmatics and is divided into four parts: "Linguistic Change and Philosophy of Linguistics", "Pragmatics of Addressing", "Speech Acts and Politeness", and "The Literary Construction of Conversational Dialogue". The book offers a methodological approach and analyzes forms of address in the American context, including the history of the pronoun "usted" in Central America and forms of address in 19th and 20th-century Ecuadorian novels. It also studies verbal politeness in medieval Spanish texts, communicative routines of gratitude in classical Spanish, and requests for politeness in the courtly society of the Golden Age. The last chapter focuses on the phenomena of conversational language in the 16th century through the comparison of Spanish translations of theatrical works from different eras. [Extracted from the article]

Language is central to the way people learn about the natural world. A salient concern of the biodiversity conservation arena has been to understand how language can be employed by scientists to communicate knowledge to nonexpert audiences and build ecological literacy. The use of analogy and narrative by scientists are prominent techniques. In this article, we consider how these two modes of language-based reasoning extend into ordinary conversational language use by the public, specifically when articulating everyday understanding and experiences of biodiversity. Drawing on a process of public engagement in a UK woodland environment, a typological framework based on principles of analogical and narrative reasoning is developed to characterize the precise character of processes of everyday biodiversity sense making. The implications of the framework are discussed in the context of future biodiversity research, particularly its participatory and educational dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Getting all students involved in a class can be a difficult task. Getting students excited about reading, writing, and learning can be an even more difficult task. Fortunately, using dialogues is an easy strategy that any teacher can implement in any grade in any subject area to get students up, moving, and actively engaged in the learning process. Dialogues are essentially two-person plays or skits that students act out in pairs. Each dialogue focuses on a specific topic and introduces key vocabulary terms and concepts in a way that students can understand, using day-to-day conversational language. In addition, all students love using dialogues because they appeal to various interests. The "science-y" students love the content, the lit/drama students love the format, and the class comics love the humor! AND they can be personalized and modified to meet the needs of specific students and educational goals and can be used with other strategies such as exit slips, labs, content review, and more. In short, dialogues are an easy way to create an inclusive classroom where every student is engaged and successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the rapidly evolving domain of conversational agents, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Chatbot Development Platforms (CDPs) is a significant innovation. This study compares the efficacy of employing generic and fine-tuned GPT-3.5-turbo models for designing dialog flows, focusing on the intent and entity recognition crucial for dynamic conversational interactions. Two distinct approaches are introduced: a generic GPT-based system (G-GPT) leveraging the pre-trained model with complex prompts for intent and entity detection, and a fine-tuned GPT-based system (FT-GPT) employing customized models for enhanced specificity and efficiency. The evaluation encompassed the systems' ability to accurately classify intents and recognize named entities, contrasting their adaptability, operational efficiency, and customization capabilities. The results revealed that, while the G-GPT system offers ease of deployment and versatility across various contexts, the FT-GPT system demonstrates superior precision, efficiency, and customization, although it requires initial training and dataset preparation. This research highlights the versatility of LLMs in enriching conversational features for talking assistants, from social robots to interactive chatbots. By tailoring these advanced models, the fluidity and responsiveness of conversational agents can be enhanced, making them more adaptable and effective in a variety of settings, from customer service to interactive learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of biological materials and bio‐inspired materials science is well established; however, surprisingly little knowledge is systematically translated to engineering solutions. To accelerate discovery and guide insights, an open‐source autoregressive transformer large language model (LLM), BioinspiredLLM, is reported. The model is finetuned with a corpus of over a thousand peer‐reviewed articles in the field of structural biological and bio‐inspired materials and can be prompted to recall information, assist with research tasks, and function as an engine for creativity. The model has proven that it is able to accurately recall information about biological materials and is further strengthened with enhanced reasoning ability, as well as with Retrieval‐Augmented Generation (RAG) to incorporate new data during generation that can also help to traceback sources, update the knowledge base, and connect knowledge domains. BioinspiredLLM also has shown to develop sound hypotheses regarding biological materials design and remarkably so for materials that have never been explicitly studied before. Lastly, the model shows impressive promise in collaborating with other generative artificial intelligence models in a workflow that can reshape the traditional materials design process. This collaborative generative artificial intelligence method can stimulate and enhance bio‐inspired materials design workflows. Biological materials are at a critical intersection of multiple scientific fields and models like BioinspiredLLM help to connect knowledge domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a widespread view that 'academic language' is the most significant dimension of language. This aspect of language is widely used for academic purposes that contrast with the conversational language spoken outside of the classrooms. The ultimate focus on the linguistic features of academic syllabi overlooks the role everyday forms of conversational language play in academic work and how learners of marginalized backgrounds are capable of using their existing linguistic resources to navigate tasks within the classrooms. The paper intends to shift the focus from academic texts to the language of ideas used to navigate in disciplinary works, such as how the ideas and content can be expressed in various ways, and the linguistic resources learners of unprivileged backgrounds use to engage in the tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of emphasis in an attempt to determine its acoustic correlates in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese Arabic (CMLL), an urban colloquial variety of Arabic spoken in Lebanon. Several analyses of emphasis exist in the literature, which largely focus on neighbouring vowels and either investigate, or make use of, a link between F2 lowering and emphasis. This study, based on acoustic data from 11 speakers, considers various possible consonantal as well as vocalic correlates. The vocalic analyses make use of statistical modelling in linear mixed effects, and generalised additive mixed modelling. This study finds significant F2 lowering in vowels preceding the emphatic voiceless sibilant /ṣ/. It argues that, in terms of the acoustics, emphasis is a vocalic rather than consonantal phenomenon, and that, in CMLL, the phonological feature 'emphasis' is consonantal, but is realized phonetically as a colouration of the adjacent vowels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to explore the role of the linguistic style used in the brand-posted social media content on consumer engagement in the Fintech domain. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 3,286 tweets (registering nearly 1.35 million impressions) published by 10 leading Fintech unicorns in India were extracted using the Twitter API. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary was used to analyse the linguistic characteristics of the shared tweets. Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) was used for testing the hypotheses. Findings: This study finds that using drive words and cognitive language increases consumer engagement with Fintech messages via the central route of information processing. Further, affective words and conversational language drive consumer engagement through the peripheral route of information processing. Research limitations/implications: The study extends the literature on brand engagement by unveiling the effect of linguistic features used to design social media messages. Practical implications: The study provides guidance to social media marketers of Fintech brands regarding what content strategies best enhance consumer engagement. The linguistic style to improve online consumer engagement (OCE) is detailed. Originality/value: The study's findings contribute to the growing stream of Fintech literature by exploring the role of linguistic style on consumer engagement in social media communication. The study's findings indicate the relevance of the dual processing mechanism of elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as an explanatory theory for evaluating consumer engagement with messages posted by Fintech brands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a book review of "Sociolinguistic variation in Old English: Records of communities and people" by Olga Timofeeva. The review discusses the challenges faced by historical sociolinguistics in studying Old English due to the limited and biased available material. The book aims to fill this gap by examining different genres and registers of Old English in relation to the communities that used them. It utilizes corpus linguistics and databases to gather information and explores social networks and communities of practice to understand linguistic variation in Old English. The book also focuses on the sociolinguistic analysis of different types of charters in Old English, exploring factors such as region, gender, and social networks that influence language and structure. It also discusses the multilingual practice after the Norman Conquest and the borrowing of loan terminology. The author emphasizes the importance of social networks and discourse communities in understanding sociolinguistic changes in Old English variation. [Extracted from the article]

There has been a growing effort to replace manual extraction of data from research papers with automated data extraction based on natural language processing, language models, and recently, large language models (LLMs). Although these methods enable efficient extraction of data from large sets of research papers, they require a significant amount of up-front effort, expertise, and coding. In this work, we propose the ChatExtract method that can fully automate very accurate data extraction with minimal initial effort and background, using an advanced conversational LLM. ChatExtract consists of a set of engineered prompts applied to a conversational LLM that both identify sentences with data, extract that data, and assure the data's correctness through a series of follow-up questions. These follow-up questions largely overcome known issues with LLMs providing factually inaccurate responses. ChatExtract can be applied with any conversational LLMs and yields very high quality data extraction. In tests on materials data, we find precision and recall both close to 90% from the best conversational LLMs, like GPT-4. We demonstrate that the exceptional performance is enabled by the information retention in a conversational model combined with purposeful redundancy and introducing uncertainty through follow-up prompts. These results suggest that approaches similar to ChatExtract, due to their simplicity, transferability, and accuracy are likely to become powerful tools for data extraction in the near future. Finally, databases for critical cooling rates of metallic glasses and yield strengths of high entropy alloys are developed using ChatExtract. Efficient data extraction from research papers accelerates science and engineering. Here, the authors develop an automated approach which uses conversational large language models to achieve high precision and recall in extracting materials data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With this article I explore the relationship between core academic language skills (CALS) - a construct representing a set of high-utility language skills needed to manage the linguistic features prevalent in academic texts across content areas - and schooling outcomes. There has long been an understanding that there is a distinction between academic language and colloquial language, originally described by Jim Cummins (1976) as cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS). The construct has only recently been operationalised (Uccelli, Phillips Galloway, Barr, Meneses & Dobbs, 2015) as the individual skills and competencies that underlie CALP. The CALS construct describes an empirically testable set of competencies that address this need. This has been used in the development of an assessment instrument aimed at South African learners - the CALS-I-ZA (MacFarlane, Barr & Uccelli, 2022) - and I investigate whether a measurable link exists between this assessment and schooling outcomes for a sample of Grade 6 learners in 2 public schools in the Gauteng province of South Africa. Schooling outcomes have been measured using the Gauteng Provincial Common Assessments - a provincial examination intended to measure schooling outcomes on a comparable assessment instrument. The study reported on here shows a moderately strong correlation between the CALS-I-ZA and the provincial common examinations (r = 0.64 and r = 0.65). This predictive relationship between CALS and schooling outcomes leads to an argument for direct instruction in CALS as an embedded feature of pedagogy in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capture land is a Jamaican colloquialism for land that is (or is presumed to be) occupied without the authorization of the landowner. Working through two quotes, "just to make life for a time," and, "we've always been here," this article examines how the practice of capture indexes abolitionist spatial practices of varied temporalities: rooted in belonging to place, but also alighting provisionally. Through ethnographic research, this article reveals the use of capture for both placemaking and flight, parallel but in tension with the fixity and fluidity inhered in the liberal property regime. Compared with earlier ethnographies of land tenure in Jamaica, this points to an epistemology that is less preoccupied by ownership. What takes primacy is the care for generations of plants, children, rebels, and futures unfolding through "the plot" and its multiple agendas—sustenance (plot of land), refusal (plot to rebel) and the plotting of alternate futures. While here emerges through the spatiotemporalities of life in the interstices of racial capitalism, it also challenges us to reimagine how to think land after colonialism and beyond property. From here, we might imagine simultaneity of apparently discrepant temporalities of Black freedom dreams and speculate on the spacetimes of "freedom is a place." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was carried out with the main objective of investigating the impact of the English language lexeme on modern colloquial Sinhala and exploring the specific mechanisms of neologism and borrowing. Among the major findings, the impact of English on colloquial Sinhala has been identified in the processes of the acronym, coinage, alphabetic abbreviation, clipping, blending, generification, and borrowing as the dominant processes that come under the umbrella term of neologism. As borrowing mechanisms, loan words, loan shifts and loan blends followed by other subsequent mechanisms like loan translations, loan renditions and loan creations have been established with colloquial Sinhala. Participatory observation, chunk recordings and secondary data sources are methodological instruments of this research. The Englishinfluenced lexical items in modern colloquial Sinhala have been critically analysed and categorized logically with the final concluding remark that the English language's influence on modern colloquial Sinhala is inordinate with special reference to lexical categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a growing body of literature has explored multilingual users' digital practice, dialects adoptions have received relatively little attention. As an important part of the Chinese language, spoken dialects, or '方言' (fangyan), are highly complex in their classification and colloquial usage. Nevertheless, Chinese online users, especially those of younger generations, find ways to incorporate dialects in stylised online expressions for language play. This study explores the strategic adoptions of dialects by investigating stylised dialectal expressions through a leading video-sharing website in China, bilibili.com. By identifying representative Chinese dialectal phrases and phonetic features, the authors coded a total of 1779 instances of dialect-stylised expressions from 159 videos on bilibili.com. Further investigation and analysis reveal that the sampled expressions largely reflect the dialectal features found in Northeastern Guanhua, Cantonese, Southwestern Guanhua and Min, representing an overarching representation of some of the large dialectal groups in Chinese Mainland. In addition, various linguistic strategies, such as phonetic transliteration and Romanised letters, were used to facilitate and stylise the digital representations of these spoken dialects. The findings exhibit Bilibili users' flexible choices of multilingual resources for dialect stylisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetry of Mexican author Jaime Sabines (1926–1999) is situated within a period of change in Latin America (Cuban revolution, dictatorships, and stylistic changes in literature) that linked the author to colloquialism. According to Cesare Del Mastro, this is a form marked by the use of plain and popular language rather than academicism. Using this style as a platform, two central topics presented in the collection of poems Diario Semanario y poemas en prosa (1961) are addressed in this paper: the everyday and the mortuary. Both are shown as symptomatic expressions of an affront to modernity, with signs of oppression, and the tense relationships and poetic responses are analyzed as a response to deep historical transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For proper assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of language disorders in Mandarin children, it is important to have measures that closely track the course of normal development. The current study uses a large collection of spontaneous conversational language samples to track the developmental course of five language measures: mean length of utterance (MLU), the MLU of the five longest utterances (MLU5), vocD, number of repetitions, and number of retracings. We used cross-validation-based linear regression to estimate the relationship between age, gender and each of the five variables derived from the conversational language samples in 101 typically developing Mandarin-speaking children aged 3 to 7. Each of the five measures showed significant age-related effects during the period from age 3 to age 7. As norm-referenced measures of language development in children speaking Mandarin, these developmental data could inform clinical therapists regarding assessments and interventions for children with language disorder or impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ars & Humanitas is the property of Ars & Humanitas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The document is a review of a book titled "Usage-based and Typological Approaches to Linguistic Units." The book examines whether linguistic categories like subject, clause, or predicate are universal across languages or specific to each language. It presents research articles that use authentic corpus data and a usage-based approach to explore the universality of linguistic units and the concept of "participant orientation" in different languages. The review discusses the perspectives and findings presented in the book, including studies on English, Finnish, Japanese, and Indonesian conversations. The reviewer suggests future research should include more languages, consider diachronic analysis, and explore the role of prosody in linguistic units. Overall, the book challenges traditional views on the universality of linguistic categories and provides valuable insights into the study of linguistic units. It is recommended for those interested in gaining a deeper understanding of these topics. [Extracted from the article]

In an era where migration across borders is increasingly the norm, how are our understandings of language and the ways we talk about language being reimagined along the way? This article examines this question by attending to the shifting metadiscourses of "Chinglish," a colloquialism referring to Chinese-English hybridizations. Chinglish, originally used to describe an incompetent interlanguage, has come to be invoked as a means of establishing "China English" as a legitimate world English variety, or more recently even as an innovative form of translingual practice. This article presents Chinglish as a form of "border languaging," which enables us to take stock of the shifting meanings of Chinglish in relation to the linguistic "border" between English and Chinese upon which such metadiscursive framings hinge, and how the shifting orientations to such linguistic borders invite new ways of conceptualizing Chinglish and historically marginalized language practices more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research tried to investigate a specific case of pronominal enclitic (eš/aš) in colloquial Persian based on functional approach. Two novels including a total of 56,500 words and the data on the internet were used as corpus. A corpus of 110 sentences with the desired structure were extracted. The investigation revealed that the reference of pronominal enclitic is the common and assumed knowledge of interlocutors which might be represented as a proposition in the discourse or activated by an element in the language. The pronominal enclitic is structurally a presupposition trigger and adjuncts (rastaš, haqiqataš, vaqeiataš) are discourse markers. The reference enclitic holds old information and is a specified definite. The predicate following enclitic holds new information and is a specified indefinite. This predicate contains focal information. The third fason singular enclitic appears both as an adjunct and as a clause at the beginning of the sentence and can be omitted. Their semantic and pragmatic function is truth assertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID pandemic has sparked fear among many people worldwide and has thus led to the emergence of a variety of conspiracy theories. Individuals believing in these theories come from various social and demographic backgrounds, some of them being mere skeptics, while others are more radical and extreme. The present paper investigates the use of language in a conspiratorial anti-COVID Facebook group with the aim of describing the linguistic features and strategies employed to share and spread conspiracy theories and to form a common identity. The results show that the group uses features typical of extremist groups, such the ideological in- and out-group presentation, the use of agentless passives to create fear, and intertextual references. Further strategies detected in the data are the misrepresentation of scientific knowledge, the use of colloquial language, humor, and irony, among others, which are used to create a bond among the groups' members and to set themselves apart from the government and the rest of the population, whom they perceive as enemies and oppressors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay delves into the multifaceted nature of the Tagalog word ano, examining its usage in various contexts and its impact on communication within Tagalog-speaking communities. Three cases of ano are discussed in the essay. The first case pertains to ano accompanied by ostension; the second, pertains to ano accompanied by context clues; and the third, pertains to ano without any ostension or context. In Tagalog communities, ano, despite the lack of ostension or context, is sometimes still used in everyday conversations, presenting the problem of how meaning or understanding of the word ano is still possible. The third case of ano will be further divided into two: IT-ano (ibang tao-ano) and HIT-ano (hindi ibang tao-ano) providing the difference between strangers and acquaintances. By relying on Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of what it means to understand through language-game, this essay discusses how a vague word such as ano gives rise to meaning and understanding. This approach to clarify meaning will relate to the levels of social interaction found in Virgilio Enriquez's idea of pakikipagkapwa. The analysis will proceed by referring to hypothetical scenarios involving the use of the term ano situated in the everyday conversational use of language by Filipinos. The mode of analysis takes the perspective of the author, who is a native speaker of Tagalog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of the article attempts to describe the linguistic phenomenon of labelling and stigmatization concerning children. In the introduction, the issue of child discrimination, known as adultism, is addressed. Then, the author discusses the origins and mechanisms of pejorative terms which frequently appear in online discussions related to motherhood and parenthood. In the analytical section, the author presents the most commonly used and negatively charged personal expressions, extracted, e. g. from the Monco PL search engine: bombelek, gówniak, kaszojad, purchlę and purchlak [pejorative terms denoting children]. Possible etymologies and usage examples are provided. Originally unequivocally negative terms for children also permeate colloquial language and gradually become neutralized or serve to distance oneself from parenthood. However, in this context, it's worth referring to the ethics of language and promoting inclusive communication, which should also extend to talking about children and communicating with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colloquialization has been identified as one of the most crucial change processes of the English language, through which written genres gradually shift towards spoken styles. Colloquialism refers to the synchronous features resulting from colloquialization. There is limited research into the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese or how Chinese colloquialism manifests in different spoken and written genres. To extract the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese, this study used a corpus-driven approach to determine and compare keywords and phrase frames from two training Chinese corpora and those keywords and phrase frames with higher frequencies were retained for further testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the study of the pragmalinguistic functions of the silence as a pragmatic sign in conversational narratives out of personal experiences produced by speakers from Santiago de Chile. Starting from the analysis of 27 videorecording narrations it was possible to identify the linguistic, non-verbal, and situational traits that define the meaning of silence and to propose a taxonomy of functions based on the theory of prototypes. The main findings account for the existence of at least 10 types of silences--some more prototypical than others--defined by the pragmatic functions that they play in the genre of conversational narrative. Such types can be organized into four categories: structuring silences of the conversation, structuring silences of the narrative, discursive silences and cognitive silences. It is the structuring silences of the narrative that operate as a prototype of the field of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The language of literary texts is a complex and multiform phenomenon. One of the problems connected with it is the employment of non-standard linguistic varieties. This paper focuses on the especial situation in Czech culture in the 1950s. In that decade, literary critics and linguists strictly required the use of Standard Czech and the restriction of non-standard varieties in literary texts. On the other hand, various inedited works were written the language of which was based on the so-called Common Czech, colloquialisms and slangs. The main part of the paper describes the language of stories by Jan Zábrana (from the years 1954 to 1957) in relation to the official requirements. Zábrana's stories (published posthumously in the 1990s) represent a radical denying of these requirements. Zábrana depicts spontaneous and informal spoken communication that differs from the idea of cultivated standard expression. Both the figures and the narrator consistently use nonstandard linguistic means and colloquial lexicon (including vulgarisms). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents how teachers in the exolingual environment perceive colloquiality in teaching Polish as a foreign language. For this purpose, focus and individual interviews were conducted with Polish language specialists at the University of Ankara and the University of Istanbul in Turkey. The study shows that teachers are aware of the need to teach colloquial Polish, nevertheless learning this variety is usually assigned as students’ independent work. Colloquiality is developed mainly as receptive skills, while the active use of colloquial vocabulary is treated as an extracurricular element. In addition, Turkish teachers often assume the attitude of learners towards colloquialism, treating Polish teachers as having greater competence to teach colloquial language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental designs provide strong evidence for causal claims involving the main effects of a treatment but analyzes that solely focus on the main effects are inherently limited. Considerations for effect heterogeneity allow psychotherapy researchers to investigate for whom and under what conditions a treatment is likely to be effective. Evidence of causal moderation requires more stringent assumptions but is an important extension of treatment effect heterogeneity when interventions on the moderator are possible. This primer clarifies and differentiates treatment effect heterogeneity and causal moderation in the context of psychotherapy research. Particular attention is given to the causal framework, assumptions, estimation, and interpretation of causal moderation. An illustrative example is included to ensure an approachable format with colloquial and intuitive language with R syntax provided to encourage and ease future implementation. This primer encourages proper consideration and interpretation of treatment effect heterogeneity and, when conditions are met, causal moderation. This knowledge improves the understanding of treatment efficacy across participant characteristics and study contexts and, relatedly, the generalizability of treatment effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interventions focused on the home language environment have been shown to improve a number of child language outcomes in the first years of life. However, data on the longer‐term effects of the intervention are still somewhat limited. The current study examines child vocabulary and complex speech outcomes (N = 59) during the year following completion of a parent‐coaching intervention, which was previously found to increase the quantity of parent‐child conversational turns and to improve child language outcomes through 18 months of age. Measures of parental language input, child speech output, and parent‐child conversational turn‐taking were manually coded from naturalistic home recordings (Language Environment Analysis System, LENA) at regular 4‐month intervals when children were 6‐ to 24‐months old. Child language skills were assessed using the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) at four time‐points following the final intervention session (at 18, 24, 27, and 30 months). Vocabulary size and growth from 18 to 30 months was greater in the intervention group, even after accounting for differences in child language ability during the intervention period. The intervention group also scored higher on measures of speech length and grammatical complexity, and these effects were mediated by 18‐month vocabulary. Intervention was associated with increased parent‐child conversational turn‐taking in home recordings at 14 months, and mediation analysis suggested that 14‐month conversational turn‐taking accounted for intervention‐related differences in subsequent vocabulary. Together, the results suggest enduring, positive effects of parental language intervention and underscore the importance of interactive, conversational language experience during the first 2 years of life. Research Highlights: Parent coaching was provided as part of a home language intervention when children were 6–18 months of age.Naturalistic home language recordings showed increased parent‐child conversational turn‐taking in the intervention group at 14 months of age.Measures of productive vocabulary and complex speech indicated more advanced expressive language skills in the intervention group through 30 months of age, a full year after the final intervention session.Conversational turn‐taking at 14 months predicted subsequent child vocabulary and accounted for differences in vocabulary size across the intervention and control groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Donate Speech campaign has so far succeeded in gathering approximately 3600 h of ordinary, colloquial Finnish speech into the Lahjoita puhetta (Donate Speech) corpus. The corpus includes over twenty thousand speakers from all the regions of Finland and from all age brackets. The primary goals of the collection were to create a representative, large-scale resource to study spontaneous spoken Finnish and to accelerate the development of language technology and speech-based services. In this paper, we present the collection process and the collected corpus, and showcase its versatility through multiple use cases. The evaluated use cases include: automatic speech recognition of spontaneous speech, detection of age, gender, dialect and topic and metadata analysis. We provide benchmarks for the use cases, as well downloadable, trained baseline systems with open-source code for reproducibility. One further use case is to verify the metadata and transcripts given in this corpus itself, and to suggest artificial metadata and transcripts for the part of the corpus where it is missing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]