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Although lexical borrowing is an important aspect of language evolution, there have been few attempts to automate the identification of borrowings in lexical datasets. Moreover, none of the solutions which have been proposed so far identify borrowings across multiple languages. This study proposes a new method for the task and tests it on a newly compiled large comparative dataset of 48 South-East Asian languages from Southern China. The method yields very promising results, while it is conceptually straightforward and easy to apply. This makes the approach a perfect candidate for computer-assisted exploratory studies on lexical borrowing in contact areas.

AbstractScientific writings, as one essential part of human culture, have evolved over centuries into their current form. Knowing how scientific writings evolved is particularly helpful in understanding how trends in scientific culture developed. It also allows us to better understand how scientific culture was interwoven with human culture generally. The availability of massive digitized texts and the progress in computational technologies today provide us with a convenient and credible way to discern the evolutionary patterns in scientific writings by examining the diachronic linguistic changes. The linguistic changes in scientific writings reflect the genre shifts that took place with historical changes in science and scientific writings. This study investigates a general evolutionary linguistic pattern in scientific writings. It does so by merging two credible computational methods: relative entropy; word-embedding concreteness and imageability. It thus creates a novel quantitative methodology and applies this to the examination of diachronic changes in the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society (PTRS, 1665–1869). The data from two computational approaches can be well mapped to support the argument that this journal followed the evolutionary trend of increasing professionalization and specialization. But it also shows that language use in this journal was greatly influenced by historical events and other socio-cultural factors. This study, as a “culturomic” approach, demonstrates that the linguistic evolutionary patterns in scientific discourse have been interrupted by external factors even though this scientific discourse would likely have cumulatively developed into a professional and specialized genre. The approaches proposed by this study can make a great contribution to full-text analysis in scientometrics.

Abstract Hyphenated compounds have largely been neglected in the studies of compounding, which have seldom analysed compounds in context. In this study, we argue that the hyphen use in compounds is strongly motivated. Hyphenation is used when words form a unit, which reduces the possibility of parsing them into separate units or other forms. The current study adopts a new perspective on contextual factors, namely, which part of speech (PoS) the compound as a whole belongs to and how people correctly parse a compound into a unit. This process can be observed and analysed by considering examples. This study therefore holds that hyphenation might have gradually become a compounding technique that differs from general compounding principles. To better understand hyphenated compounds and the motivation for using hyphenation, we conduct a quantitative investigation into their distribution frequency to explore how English hyphenated compounds have been used in over the last 200 years. Diachronic change in the frequency of the distribution for compounds has seldom been considered. This question is explored by using frequency data obtained from the three databases that contain hyphenated compounds. Diachronic analysis shows that the frequencies of tokens and types in hyphenated compounds have been increasing, and changes in both frequencies follow the S-curve model. Historical evidence shows that hyphenation in compounds, as an orthographic form, does not seem to disappear easily. Familiarity and economy, as suggested in the cognitive studies of compounding, cannot adequately explain this phenomenon. The three databases that we used provide cross-verification that suggests that hyphenation has evolved into a compounding technique. Language users probably unconsciously take advantage of the discriminative learning model to remind themselves that these combinations should be parsed differently. Thus the hyphenation compounding technique facilitates communication efficiency. Overall, this study significantly enhances our understanding of the nature of compounding, the motivations for using hyphenation, and its cognitive processing.

Im Folgenden werden äußerst verdichtet nach methodologischen und methodischen Überlegungen (1) Facetten des Forschungsstands zur Auseinandersetzung der Erziehungswissenschaft mit dem NS skizziert (2) und erste Umrisse der Ehrungspraxis der DGfE nachgezeichnet (3). Anschließend sollen der bisherige Forschungsstand und erste Erkenntnisse zum Fall Hildegard Hetzer dargestellt (4) sowie Anregungen zum weiteren Vorgehen und für die Entwicklung möglicher Leitfragen gegeben werden (5). Auf bereits publizierte Ergebnisse zu Friedrich Edding (Rohstock 2019) kann hier nur verwiesen werden, während erste Sondierungen zu Eugen Löffler, die dem DGfE-Vorstand vorliegen, ausgespart bleiben. +repphzhbib2020F

Pseudowords have long served as key tools in psycholinguistic investigations of the lexicon. A common assumption underlying the use of pseudowords is that they are devoid of meaning: Comparing words and pseudowords may then shed light on how meaningful linguistic elements are processed differently from meaningless sound strings. However, pseudowords may in fact carry meaning. On the basis of a computational model of lexical processing, linear discriminative learning (LDL Baayen et al., Complexity, 2019, 1–39, 2019), we compute numeric vectors representing the semantics of pseudowords. We demonstrate that quantitative measures gauging the semantic neighborhoods of pseudowords predict reaction times in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) database (Tucker et al., 2018). We also show that the model successfully predicts the acoustic durations of pseudowords. Importantly, model predictions hinge on the hypothesis that the mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact. Thus, pseudowords emerge as an outstanding tool for gauging the resonance between production and comprehension. Many pseudowords in the MALD database contain inflectional suffixes. Unlike many contemporary models, LDL captures the semantic commonalities of forms sharing inflectional exponents without using the linguistic construct of morphemes. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications for models of lexical processing and morphological theory. The results of this study, complementing those on real words reported in Baayen et al., (Complexity, 2019, 1–39, 2019), thus provide further evidence for the usefulness of LDL both as a cognitive model of the mental lexicon, and as a tool for generating new quantitative measures that are predictive for human lexical processing.

Abstract Starting from the issue of how mean sea level has come to represent, since the early nineteenth century, the most commonly adopted vertical datum, this paper reviews the inherent biases and limitations of attempting to measure the sea from individual locations tucked away in bays and inlets along the coast. It then delves into a history of the attempts made to move measurements away from continental shores, including efforts to collect water height data from the bottom of the sea and from remote islands. Finally, it provides a history of the shift from attempting to measure the level of water at coastal locations to estimating, instead, where water ought to be. To achieve this, the article focuses on early developments in gravimetry at sea as a tool to map more precisely the geoid and, thus, the oceans’ topography. The idea behind these developments was to obtain more accurate results and a more trustworthy geodetic framework by getting rid of the variability caused by relative movement of land and sea and by contextual topographical challenges. It was also an attempt to delocalize the data collection endeavour in order to focus on inferring and estimating average values. It was thought that increasing the degree of abstraction would enable an improved representation of the planet and its oceans.

How does the aftermath of 1989 shape the meaning of this event today? On the basis of an interview study with sixty-seven respondents from former East Germany and the Czech Republic administered in 2016–2017, this article asks how individuals articulate “economic memories” against the background of the 1990s, a time in which the transition to democracy was accompanied by labor market ruptures. It documents how salient themes of change are narrated in terms of work and its moral dimensions; and how memories of the time are concerned with mobilizing one’s skills in the face of economic change. The article distinguishes five accounts by which respondents differently incorporate the historical event of 1989 into a vernacular, biographical logic. This framework offers a “bottom-up” perspective as a contribution to our understanding of the ongoing contestations over the meaning of the 1989 revolutions.

Abstract Against the backdrop of the destruction of Iraqi heritage over the past quarter of a century, this article critically reviews key aspects of the current state of Iraq’s cultural heritage, including damage to heritage buildings caused by Daesh in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. We bring together Iraqi and non-Iraqi expertise in heritage, archaeology, and human rights law to frame our approach, building on the movement to link cultural diversity, heritage, and cultural rights. We emphasise the need for planning to enhance protection of Iraq’s heritage, in particular through the preparation of inventories, the provision of resources for heritage education in schools and the development of Iraq’s museum sector. Iraq’s presence on the UNESCO World Heritage Lists needs to be enhanced, and the issues of illicit site looting and traffic in looted antiquities must be addressed within international contexts. Iraq’s future accession as State Party to the 1999 Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention is a priority in achieving these goals. The paper stresses the need for co-creation of heritage knowledge and a gender-sensitive human rights approach for the future of Iraq’s globally significant cultural heritage. About RASHID International RASHID International is a worldwide network of archaeologists and cultural heritage experts dedicated to safeguarding and promoting the cultural heritage of Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia. To assist our Iraqi colleagues, we collect and share information, research and expert knowledge, work to raise public awareness, and both develop and execute strategies to protect heritage sites and other cultural property through international cooperation, advocacy and technical assistance. RASHID International is registered as a non-profit organisation in Germany and enjoys charitable tax-exempt status under German law. We are an organisation in special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council since 2019. Learn more about our work at www.rashid-international.org All of our research is available open access here: https://zenodo.org/communities/rashid-international/

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in "Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies" on 8th May, 2019, available at http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17533171.2019.1579475." Abstract One of the less researched aspects of postcolonial India’s “progressive” culture is its Soviet connection. Starting in the 1950s and consolidating in the 1960s, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics invested in building up “committed” networks amongst writers, directors, actors, and other theater- and film-practitioners across India. Thus, an entire generation of cultural professionals was initiated into the anticolonial solidarity of emerging Afro-Asian nations that were seen, and portrayed, by the Soviets as being victims of “Western” imperialism. The aspirational figure of the New Soviet Man was celebrated through the rise of a new form of “transactional sociality” (Westlund 2003). This paper looks at selected cases of cultural diplomacy—through the lens of cultural history—between the USSR and India for two decades after India’s Independence, exploring the possibility of theorizing it from the perspective of an anticolonial cultural solidarity that allowed agency to Indian interlocutors.

In this paper, we present a novel context-dependent approach to modeling word meaning, and apply it to the modeling of metaphor. In distributional semantic approaches, words are represented as points in a high dimensional space generated from co-occurrence statistics; the distances between points may then be used to quantifying semantic relationships. Contrary to other approaches which use static, global representations, our approach discovers contextualized representations by dynamically projecting low-dimensional subspaces; in these ad hoc spaces, words can be re-represented in an open-ended assortment of geometrical and conceptual configurations as appropriate for particular contexts. We hypothesize that this context-specific re-representation enables a more effective model of the semantics of metaphor than standard static approaches. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of English word dyads rated for degrees of metaphoricity, meaningfulness, and familiarity by human participants. We demonstrate that our model captures these ratings more effectively than a state-of-the-art static model, and does so via the amount of contextualizing work inherent in the re-representational process.