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"We must mend what has been torned apart" (Camus) : Interculturality in teacher education and training

Given the contested notion of culture, intercultural (im)politeness represents an understudied area of research. Yet, (im)politeness research should examine broader social forces. Drawing upon data from five focus group discussions and their dialogical discourse analysis, my study relies on the discursive approach and relational work (Locher and Watts, 2005). My study shows that cultural outsiders reported adhering differently to cultural politeness norms as resources. As such, a reported low tolerance for pragmatic variation in the Finnish and French cultures appears to carry two consequences. First, Finnish and French participants reported changing their adherence to cultural politeness norms in order to follow behavior that better corresponds to the expectations framed by the target culture, and to avoid negatively marked behavior judged as impolite/inappropriate. Second, participants who reported adhering less to the politeness norms of their culture of origin found a better match between their behavior and the dominant politeness norms in the target culture, which carried positive consequences related to constructing their identity. Finally, the close link between relational work and identity construction demonstrated that although participants reported adhering to the politeness norms of the target culture, they emphasized teaching their children the politeness norms of their culture of origin. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper addresses the topic of old age from the viewpoint of literary gerontology. My emphasis is on contemporary Russian literary representations of old age senility (dementia), which I juxtapose with representations of madness and the devices and meanings traditionally embedded in mental disorders. It is a well-known fact that, not unlike madness, dementia is compelling in fiction, but cruel in life. The main questions I pose are: why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the person who is believed to be demented? Is it at all possible to convey in a literary text what it means to be demented? It is asserted that literature provides a flexible mode of expressing and rendering a meaning to the unfathomable complexity of the human mind by illustrating individual situated cases. In literature, madness has found its own rhetoric and logic, and with them, its own champions. But is this true of representations of dementia? Madness has made itself heard and survived as a speaking subject mainly through literature. How about dementia? Does it find a speaking and experiencing subject in literature and how can this be articulated? Or does he/she remain an object of depiction, another case-study told by an outside narrator, e.g. a caregiver or a nurse? How to tell a story about dementia, the plot of which is predictable, in such a way that it may generate empathy and enhance our understanding of the condition? I argue that the success and significance of a dementia story depends on both the literary genre in which it is written, and the literary devices employed. Moreover, the position of the narrator, his/her emotional distance to the story seems to be decisive in invoking empathy, understanding and insight. I explore texts from Russian contemporary literature (Panteleev, Katerli) that share a common theme of old age and dementia while belonging to different subgenres of prose - the so-called documentary prose and fictional prose.

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Translation Studies has branched out into a heterogeneous interdiscipline during the past few decades. This development is not only the result of the emergence of different kinds of translation practices, research questions and new technologies, but also of different epistemo­logical and ontological assumptions about the object of study. Four major areas are outlined: linguistic, cultural, cognitive and sociological. Connections between them are briefly dis­cussed, but the main tendency has been one of fragmentation. Perhaps this does not matter?

Interculturality is a word of consequence in education although it might be used as a mere ‘stop-gap’. The authors have taught and researched this complex notion in e.g. China, Finland, France, Malaysia and Russia. They have also been involved and engaged with top scholars, and participated in many international research projects on intercultural issues. In this critical and refreshing book, Dervin and Simpson alert us to the current dangers of treating interculturality loosely in education. They suggest moving beyond merely rehearsing theories, models, concepts and methods. More importantly they urge researchers, teachers and students to question Western-centric ideologies of interculturality passed onto them by supranational institutions (amongst others). As a whole the book aims to launch debates concerning ideologies, definitions and ownership of interculturality. The book is based around dialogues between the authors, through which the readers are made to un-re-think e.g. what intercultural means, the burning question of intercultural preparation and the state of research in education today. Each chapter is concluded by clear and thought-provoking summaries as well as thought-provoking questions for the reader to reflect on. The book conclusion offers a clear and succinct summary of what to take away and covers three essential aspects of interculturality: conceptualising, researching and preparing for interculturality. Intercultural and the Political Within Education is a must read for those who are dissatisfied with current intercultural research and education.

This article describes the experiments and systems developed by the SUKI team for the second edition of the Romanian Dialect Identification (RDI) shared task which was organized as part of the 2021 VarDial Evaluation Campaign. We submitted two runs to the shared task and our second submission was the overall best submission by a noticeable margin. Our best submission used a character n-gram based naive Bayes classifier with adaptive language models. We describe our experiments on the development set leading to both submissions.

This essay explores the various ways of talking about senility and how the two competing (or, possibly, complementing) discourses—the biomedical dementia discourse and the discourse of senility as part of “normal” aging—affect our perception of and attitudes toward old age. Moreover, I explore the role of fiction in articulating senility. As my approach combines critical gerontology with narratological analysis, it belongs to the burgeoning domain of literary gerontology, a discipline that embraces various literary genres from fiction to nonfiction. This double perspective of literary studies and cultural gerontology makes it possible to examine senility as a historically and culturally specific concept and phenomenon. My aim is to demonstrate with two examples from contemporary Russian short prose (Nina Katerli’s story “Na dva golosa” [In Two Voices] and Nina Sadur’s story “Stul” [The Chair]) how a literary work can be related to prevailing cultural, sociological, and medical discourses on and norms of aging. With tools of narratology I shed light on the literary devices deployed in the stories to articulate the experience of senility from the viewpoint of the elderly protagonists themselves. Text in English DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-2-169-186

Intercultural interaction may be complicated by differing verbal and nonverbal displays of (im)politeness. Yet cultural outsiders’ evaluations of (im)politeness have not been widely examined. To fill this gap, this study investigated perceptions of Finnish politeness among French people living in Finland and perceptions of French politeness among Finns currently or previously living in France. Focus groups were used in order to study culturally shared (im)politeness norms and their variations. Based on a dialogical discourse analysis of five focus group discussions, it is argued that personal space emerges as a salient factor for politeness in Finland, while verbal and nonverbal rapport is more important in France. These overarching themes - personal space and rapport - led to discussions about greetings, silence and holding doors open. Greeting and opening doors appeared more categorical in France, while silence was better tolerated in Finland. In addition to dominant norms, regional and individual variations were reported. Overall, (im)politeness norms appeared to be vaguer in Finland than in France. Building upon this study, future research should examine if changes emerge in Finnish (im)politeness norms related to rapport or if space remains more valued.

In this chapter, the author argues that one of the conditioning elements, education, should help break such patterns and shake up the divide between the ‘oneness’ of nature and the tendency to construct interculturality as something problematic. He also contributes to questioning this problematic and widespread attitude. The Postmodern model has been taught in many different countries (China, Finland, France, Luxembourg, amongst others) over the past decade. It has been used in initial teacher education at the University of Helsinki (Finland). If introduced alongside, the Postmodern Model and Confucian Model can help those involved in teacher education/training reflect on interculturality theoretically, methodologically and ethically. The author presents two complementary models of Intercultural Competence, which offer some reflections on ‘new paths to discover’. Long-term engagement with them in initial and in-service teacher education could have an influence on (student) teachers.

The author defended her doctoral dissertation Generic and Nonbinary Pronouns: Usage, Acceptability and Attitudes at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, on December 8, 2020. Professor Scott Kiesling (University of Pittsburgh) acted as the opponent and Professor Minna Palander-Collin (University of Helsinki) acted as the Custos. The dissertation is available at https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/321581 Non

We present an open-source online dictionary editing system, Ve′rdd, that offers a chance to re-evaluate and edit grassroots dictionaries that have been exposed to multiple amateur editors. The idea is to incorporate community activities into a state-of-the-art finite-state language description of a seriously endangered minority language, Skolt Sami. Problems involve getting the community to take part in things above the pencil-and-paper level. At times, it seems that the native speakers and the dictionary oriented are lacking technical understanding to utilize the infrastructures which might make their work more meaningful in the future, i.e. multiple reuse of all of their input. Therefore, our system integrates with the existing tools and infrastructures for Uralic language masking the technical complexities behind a user-friendly UI.

We present advances in the development of a FST-based morphological analyzer and generator for Skolt Sami. Like other minority Uralic languages, Skolt Sami exhibits a rich morphology, on the one hand, and there is little golden standard material for it, on the other. This makes NLP approaches for its study difficult without a solid morphological analysis. The language is severely endangered and the work presented in this paper forms a part of a greater whole in its revitalization efforts. Furthermore, we intersperse our description with facilitation and description practices not well documented in the infrastructure. Currently, the analyzer covers over 30,000 Skolt Sami words in 148 inflectional paradigms and over 12 derivational forms., Comment: Accepted to The 1st Joint SLTU and CCURL Workshop (SLTU-CCURL 2020)

In this chapter, the authors call the phenomena, beliefs and the ensuing attitudes, ‘walls that have been built by ghosts’. They guide the reader in his/her interrogation of the idea of Intercultural Competence (IC), to help him/her tread their own paths through the muddy roads of IC in education. Many ready-made ideas, discourses, words and phrases are imposed on scholars and practitioners about IC that many people do not dare to question or dis-use. Used in language education and teacher education in different parts of the world, this model has been recently complemented by the Confucian Model which relies on a revised understanding of Confucian Ethics. Teacher education has sometimes presented its responsibility to be the delivery of a concrete toolkit of skills and answers for any foreseeable contingencies in schools. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

This paper will provide a brief description of Skolt Sami and how it might be construed as a pluricentric language. Historical factors are identified that might contribute to a pluricentric identity: geographic location and political history; shortages of language documentation, and the establishment of a normative body for the development of a standard language. Skolt Sami is assessed in the context of Sami languages and is forwarded as one of a closely related yet distinct language group. Here the issue then becomes one of facilitating diversity even for under-documented languages. And we aptly describe opportunities in language technology that have been utilized to this end. Finally, brief insight is given for other Uralic languages with regard to pluricentric character and possibilities for language users to facilitate the maintenance of their individual language needs.

This exploratory article represents an attempt to examine and problematize the links between the COVID-19 crisis and interculturality for education. Aiming at teacher educators, we review problems with the notion of interculturality in light of the crisis. We argue that these problems were not created by the crisis, but that the crisis unveiled them. In the first part of the article we suggest that these issues should be approached by looking into interculturality (and companion terms such as “democracy” and “equality”) as an ideology that deserves deconstructing, unthinking, reconstructing and rethinking. We also describe the problems triggered by this ideology: the need to shift from “dead imagination” (culture, difference, etc.) to unearthing the “groundwater” of the economy and globalization in the way interculturality functions. We then propose a set of three principles that could be used by teacher educators to train future teachers to deal with interculturality afresh: “Beyond comparison”, “The mirror: turning inward”, and “Questioning the unquestionables”.

Language typologists are dependent on data provided by descriptive linguists working on individual languages, who, in turn, benefit from typologists’ results, which give them new insights into the properties of their respective languages. The article addresses the relationship between typology and Uralic descriptive linguistics. The state of description of Uralic languages is examined by surveying the availability of descriptive sources on Uralic languages in the Glottolog database, which is widely used by typologists. Ways in which Uralic studies and language typology can be brought closer to each other for the benefit of both fields are discussed giving a number of recommendations for writing typologically-oriented grammars of (Uralic) languages. Finally, the use of typologically informed questionnaires in language description is briefly addressed.Аннотация. Матти Миестамо: О взаимоотношении типологической и описательной лингвистики в контексте уральских языков. Лингвисты, занимающиеся типологией, зависят от данных, предоставляемых лингвистами, работающими с конкретными языками. Последние, в свою очередь, используют результаты работы типологов, что позволяет им по-новому взглянуть на материал соответствующего языка. В статье рассматриваются взаимоотношения между типологией и описательной лингвистикой в контексте уральских языков. Положение дел в описании уральских языков оценивается на основе наличия материалов по этим языкам в базе данных Glottolog, широко используемой типологами. В статье обсуждаются способы сближения типологического и описательного подходов в изучении уральских языков, что способствует развитию обоих направлений. В статье даются рекомендации по написанию типологически ориентированных грамматик (уральских) языков. Кроме того, кратко обсуждается использование типологических анкет для описания языков.Ключевые слова: дескриптивная грамматика, описание языков, документация языков, лингвистическая типология, анкеты, уральские языкиKokkuvõte. Matti Miestamo: Tüpoloogia ja Uurali keelte kirjeldamise vahelisest suhtest. Keeletüpoloogid sõltuvad andmetest, mis pärinevad üksikkeeltega tegelevatelt deskriptiivses raamistikus töötavatelt keeleteadlastelt. Viimased aga saavad omakorda kasu tüpoloogide töö tulemustest, mis avavad uusi vaatenurki vastavate keelte omaduste kohta. Siinne artikkel käsitleb tüpoloogia ja deskriptiivse Uurali keeleteaduse vahelist suhet. Uurali keelte kirjeldamise seisu uuritakse analüüsides Uurali keeli puudutavate deskriptiivsete allikate kättesaadavust Glottologi andmebaasis, mida tüpoloogid laialdaselt kasutavad. Arutletakse viiside üle, mis aitaksid vastastikkuse kasu eesmärgil lähendada Uurali keelte uurimist ja keeletüpoloogiat, näiteks antakse mitmeid soovitusi tüpoloogilise suunitlusega (Uurali keelte) grammatikate kirjutamiseks. Lõpuks käsitletakse ka tüpoloogilise suunitlusega küsitluskavade kasutamist keelte kirjeldamisel.Märksõnad: deskriptiivne grammatika, keelekirjeldus, keelte dokumenteerimine, keeletüpoloogia, kirjastamine, küsitluskavad, Uurali keeled

This paper reports on a case study on collaborative research writing in computer science, with particular focus on the researchers' use of digital writing and social media tools. The research paper is still a prominent genre in the field, but technological advances such as the development of real-time collaborative writing tools and social media have created new opportunities for collaboration as well as the sharing of research results. This paper takes a closer look at how digital tools, particularly collaborative writing tools and Twitter, are utilised in the process of producing a research paper for publication, and how the authors and their colleagues view the role of such tools in the text production process. The data include a text history of a research paper, as well as research interviews with the main authors and their colleagues. The data have been approached from a local practices perspective, considering the paper as part of the writing practices of the multicultural research group where the authors worked. The interviews provide further perspectives on the researchers' use of digital tools. The findings shed light on collaborative research writing practices, particularly how collaborative writing tools, which enable new practices such as synchronous writing, may not be utilised by the researchers in the ways intended by the developers. The findings also highlight the significance of social media tools, particularly Twitter, in post publication activities, with important implications for researcher education. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This study investigates whether temporal features in speech can predict the perceived proficiency level in Finnish learners of Swedish. In so doing, seven expert raters assessed speech samples produced by upper secondary school students using the revised CEFR scale for phonological control. The effect of temporal features was studied with a cumulative link mixed model, and the assessments were further analyzed to study inter-rater variation. The results indicate that articulation rate and certain types of disfluencies in speech can predict the perceived proficiency level. Furthermore, assessors seem to weigh temporal features differently depending on the speech type and their individual focus.

This article first presents an overview of the social and demographic phenomena specific to the language shift situation in Sanpete County, Utah, focusing on the biggest non-English-speaking group, the Danes. This overview includes the assimilation norms that were present in the community (including from the dominant religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), social and geographical isolation, and related issues of identity and language maintenance. Using interdisciplinary methods under the rubric of sociocultural linguistic research, our analysis presents an overview of the state of Danish in today’s Sanpete County, then further divides the Danish linguistic elements into two main categories: overt and covert. The analysis of these items makes use of the notion of postvernacular language use, as well as highlighting the female and domestic-related networks of transmission. This study of the Danish-language situation in Sanpete County offers a glimpse of the final stages of complete language shift, revealing information about a rare and under-examined linguistic community within the American context.

Six cases or case types are briefly presented, illustrating a number of loose ends in translation ethics. These cases are related to reactions by different agents or voices to a clear error, and the ethical implications of these reactions. Case 1 is invented; it raises questions of accountability. Case 2 concerns reactions to errors in the source text, and official guidelines in this respect. Case 3 problematizes a literary translator’s refusal to correct certain errors. Case 4 discusses the descriptivist scholar’s problem of how to deal with clear errors. Case 5 is about a creative reaction to a serious problem in court interpreting. And case 6 analyses the ethical dilemma of trying to change traditional interpretations of passages in a sacred text, for good utilitarian reasons. Loose ends include: the need to revise codes of ethics; the clash between contractual and utilitarian ethics; clashes between voices; and the relation between personal and professional ethics (e.g. in interventionist translation).

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We introduce a conceptually novel method for eye-movement signal analysis. The method is general in that it does not place severe restrictions on sampling frequency, measurement noise or subject behavior. Event identification is based on segmentation that simultaneously denoises the signal and determines event boundaries. The full gaze position time-series is segmented into an approximately optimal piecewise linear function in O(n) time. Gaze feature parameters for classification into fixations, saccades, smooth pursuits and post-saccadic oscillations are derived from human labeling in a data-driven manner. The range of oculomotor events identified and the powerful denoising performance make the method useable for both low-noise controlled laboratory settings and high-noise complex field experiments. This is desirable for harmonizing the gaze behavior (in the wild) and oculomotor event identification (in the laboratory) approaches to eye movement behavior. Denoising and classification performance are assessed using multiple datasets. Full open source implementation is included.

This essay examines the reception of the ten-year Complete Works translation project undertaken by the Finnish publishing company Werner Söderström Oy (WSOY) in 2004-13. Focusing on reviews published in the first and last years of the project, the essay details ongoing processes of Shakespeare (re-)canonization in Finland, as each new generation explains to itself what Shakespeare means to them, and why it continues to read, translate and perform Shakespeare. These processes are visible in comments from the series editors and translators extolling the importance of Shakespeare’s work and the necessity of creating new, modern translations so Finns can read Shakespeare in their mother tongue; in discussions of the literary qualities of a good Shakespeare translation, e.g. whether it is advisable to use iambic pentameter in Finnish, a trochaic language; and in the creation of publisher and translator “heroes,” who at significant cost to themselves, whether in money in terms of the publisher, or time and effort in terms of the translators, labour to provide the public with their Shakespeare in modern Finnish. While on the whole reviewers celebrated the new translations, there was some resistance to changes in familiar lines from older translations, such as Macbeth’s “tomorrow” speech, suggesting that there are nevertheless some limits on modernizing “classic” translations.

In light of the recent developments on the international publishing scene, increasingly dominated by L2 writers of English, the question of what is considered to be "good" and "acceptable" English calls for further research. This paper examines in what ways researchers describe the English used for research writing in their field. Interview data were collected from historians and computer scientists working in Finland and Sweden. Our analysis points towards some differences in the way researchers perceive "good" writing in English in their field, and what they themselves report to practice as (co-)authors, readers/reviewers, and proofreaders. The discrepancy between the ideals and realities of research writing in English was clear in the case of the historians. Our findings suggest that in research writing for publication, there is a pull towards some form of standard norm. This standard can be jointly negotiated during the writing, reviewing, and proofreading process. It may also develop in different directions in different disciplines, but it is likely to be based on the principles of understandability and clarity. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This article discusses how victims of infanticide were portrayed in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey in 1674–1775. More specifically, the study focuses on the use of lexical NPs as subtle foregrounding devices in the trial accounts. It is argued that the use of a prosodically prominent lexical NP in a place where a topical and a highly accessible referent could naturally be expressed by an unstressed pronoun may not be emotionally or attitudinally neutral; rather, I will argue that by repeatedly using lexical NPs, the trial participants were able to express sympathy and solidarity to the victims in a very subtle way by making the referent more discourse-prominent and emphasising the victims’ young age by using head nouns like child and infant. The data will mainly be discussed from a diachronic perspective, and the results show that as most women convicted of infanticide in the eighteenth century were acquitted, the frequency of lexical NPs used in reference to the deceased children increased. The overuse of lexical NPs is particularly prominent in the trials where the woman was found guilty of the crime, suggesting a possible connection between the degree of violence used in the murder and the kinds of NPs the trial participants used to refer to the deceased children as subtle indications of sympathy.

The article describes the process of creating a Finnish language FrameNet or FinnFN, based on the original English language FrameNet hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. We outline the goals and results relating to the FinnFN project and especially to the creation of the FinnFrame corpus. The main aim of the project was to test the universal applicability of frame semantics by annotating real Finnish using the same frames and annotation conventions as in the original Berkeley FrameNet project. From Finnish newspaper corpora, 40,721 sentences were automatically retrieved and manually annotated as example sentences evoking certain frames. This became the FinnFrame corpus. Applying the Berkeley FrameNet annotation conventions to the Finnish language required some modifications due to Finnish morphology, and a convention for annotating individual morphemes within words was introduced for phenomena such as compounding, comparatives and case endings. Various questions about cultural salience across the two languages arose during the project, but problematic situations occurred only in a few examples, which we also discuss in the article. The article shows that, barring a few minor instances, the universality hypothesis of frames is largely confirmed for languages as different as Finnish and English.

Previous studies have shown a congruency effect between manual grasping and syllable articulation. For instance, a power grip is associated with syllables whose articulation involves the tongue body and/or large mouth aperture ([kɑ]) whereas a precision grip is associated with articulations that involve the tongue tip and/or small mouth aperture ([ti]). Previously, this effect has been observed in manual reaction times. The primary aim of the current study was to investigate whether this congruency effect also takes place in vocal responses and to investigate involvement of action selection processes in the effect. The congruency effect was found in vocal and manual responses regardless of whether or not the syllable or grip was known a priori, suggesting that the effect operates with minimal or absent action selection processes. In addition, the effect was observed in vocal responses even when the grip was only prepared but not performed, suggesting that merely planning a grip response primes the corresponding articulatory response. These results support the view that articulation and grasping are processed in a partially overlapping network.

Contraction of a muscle modulates not only the corticospinal excitability (CSE) of the contracting muscle but also that of different muscles. We investigated to what extent the CSE of a hand muscle is modulated during preparation and execution of teeth clenching and ipsilateral foot dorsiflexion either separately or in combination. Hand-muscle CSE was estimated based on motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle. We found higher excitability during both preparation and execution of all the motor tasks than during mere observation of a fixation cross. As expected, the excitability was greater during the execution phase than the preparation one. Furthermore, both execution and preparation of combined motor tasks led to higher excitability than individual tasks. These results extend our current understanding of the neural interactions underlying simultaneous contraction of muscles in different body parts.

We introduce a wavelet based representation system for speech prosody.Emergent hierarchy from f0, intensity and duration.Prominences and boundaries are represented in one framework.System allows for efficient analysis and annotation of prosodic events.The unsupervised prosodic labelling scheme is comparable with supervised methods. Prominences and boundaries are the essential constituents of prosodic structure in speech. They provide for means to chunk the speech stream into linguistically relevant units by providing them with relative saliences and demarcating them within utterance structures. Prominences and boundaries have both been widely used in both basic research on prosody as well as in text-to-speech synthesis. However, there are no representation schemes that would provide for both estimating and modelling them in a unified fashion. Here we present an unsupervised unified account for estimating and representing prosodic prominences and boundaries using a scale-space analysis based on continuous wavelet transform. The methods are evaluated and compared to earlier work using the Boston University Radio News corpus. The results show that the proposed method is comparable with the best published supervised annotation methods.

Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel presented a radical break with established conventions of post-war German writing. While its early critical reception in Germany tended to concentrate on this rupture, the novel was internationally read in the context of an older European tradition. Comparisons with an international literary canon were used to make the novel and its dubious hero more palatable to a potentially sceptical readership. References to major writers from Rabelais to Joyce and to the picaresque tradition in particular appear in reviews from France to Finland. By positioning Grass’s novel in the framework of the European canon the early reception established a pattern that in the long run influenced Grass’s own writing. In his subsequent work reference to canonical traditions becomes ever more visible as he unfolds dialogues with major authors of the past. By identifying with these authors Grass positioned himself as one among equals in the literary Parnassus. Having established his own international reputation and thereby contributed to enhancing the reputation of post-war German writing as a whole, his later writing increasingly paid tribute to a specifically German literary heritage.

The aim of this article is to refine the role of redundancy in deferred multimodal communication, from the standpoint of both communicators and their audiences and, by extension, translators. What is advocated here is the idea of a recursive reading process consisting of three phases (perception, construction and integration) and that this process is based on the detection of a salient series of trigger stimuli that the communicator offers as incentives. The shared ground of significance of these trigger compounds actually reveals core meanings in the document, especially when there is exophoric reference. In the translation process, any change within this redundancy system, such as a modification in the balance between endophora and exophora, might alter the overall reception experience.

This paper proposes to integrate the diachronic dimension to the typological study of gender complexity, and focuses on the morphosyntactic encoding of gender distinctions via agreement patterns. After investigating the processes of language change that foster the reduction, loss, expansion and emergence of gender agreement in a sample of fifteen sets of closely related languages (N= 36 languages), we discuss how gender agreement systems in decline and on the rise pattern in terms of complexity. We show that declining and emerging gender agreement systems may exhibit increase or decrease in complexity and discuss how this relates to the fact that they represent transitional stages between absence of gender and full-fledged gender systems. In our analysis, we make use of typological implicational hierarchies in the domain of agreement as a tool to account for diachronic variation and for the patterns of simplification/complexification in the agreement systems of the sampled languages.

Information seeking and use activities play an important role in completing the mandatory theses at Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences (UASs). The institution encounters issues related to value judgements between theoretical and practical knowledge. In this paper it is discussed how Bachelor theses are built at Finnish UASs in terms of information use events and related structures and processes. A qualitative multiple case study is reported. Data driven conceptualizations are supported by applying categories related to foundational system assumptions. The findings discussed are grouped into four themes. Some students expect predefined norms for using literary sources. Some encounter feelings of being alone with their topic, in other words, “finding” research gaps that do not exist. Insufficient knowledge about genre conventions and other situational factors can lead students to create textual solutions of their own. Different support and guidance approaches are required for each group. Information processes in theses and related problems can be based on different systemic assumptions. We suggest that these findings should be worked up as part of the efforts that are necessary in the Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences to articulate their assumptions, concepts and values related to information and knowledge use.

We approach the problem of expanding the set of cognate relations with a sequence-to-sequence NMT model. The language pair of interest, Skolt Sami and North Sami, has too limited a set of parallel data for an NMT model as such. We solve this problem on the one hand, by training the model with North Sami cognates with other Uralic languages and, on the other, by generating more synthetic training data with an SMT model. The cognates found using our method are made publicly available in the Online Dictionary of Uralic Languages.

This article describes an unsupervised language model (LM) adaptation approach that can be used to enhance the performance of language identification methods. The approach is applied to a current version of the HeLI language identification method, which is now called HeLI 2.0. We describe the HeLI 2.0 method in detail. The resulting system is evaluated using the datasets from the German dialect identification and Indo-Aryan language identification shared tasks of the VarDial workshops 2017 and 2018. The new approach with LM adaptation provides considerably higher F1-scores than the basic HeLI or HeLI 2.0 methods or the other systems which participated in the shared tasks. The results indicate that unsupervised LM adaptation should be considered as an option in all language identification tasks, especially in those where encountering out-of-domain data is likely.

This paper studies the use of NMT (neural machine translation) as a normalization method for an early English letter corpus. The corpus has previously been normalized so that only less frequent deviant forms are left out without normalization. This paper discusses different methods for improving the normalization of these deviant forms by using different approaches. Adding features to the training data is found to be unhelpful, but using a lexicographical resource to filter the top candidates produced by the NMT model together with lemmatization improves results.

We present EFMARAL, a new system for efficient and accurate word alignment using a Bayesian model with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference. Through careful selection of data structures and model architecture we are able to surpass the fast_align system, commonly used for performance-critical word alignment, both in computational efficiency and alignment accuracy. Our evaluation shows that a phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) system produces translations of higher quality when using word alignments from EFMARAL than from fast_align, and that translation quality is on par with what is obtained using GIZA++, a tool requiring orders of magnitude more processing time. More generally we hope to convince the reader that Monte Carlo sampling, rather than being viewed as a slow method of last resort, should actually be the method of choice for the SMT practitioner and others interested in word alignment.