Linguistic Frontiers

Commentary: The status of theoretical divisions in current semiotics

2022-08-01T14:13:11+00:00

We initiate a new section of the journal, an invited commentary on issues pertaining to the fields of semiotics and linguistics and personal views on what is happening in the field. In this introduction, we assess the current status of the divisions of semiotics into multiple branches and the historical overview of the semiotics/semiology debate.

On certain consequences of the objectification of languages

2022-08-01T14:24:30+00:00

Linguists hope to converge on a universal theoretical and descriptive framework applicable to all languages. Its scientific gaze theoretically places every language and every speech commu-nity under objective, descriptive scrutiny. The practical application of these principles has led to difficulties. We argue in this paper that these difficulties have to do with certain unresolved aspects of the relation between the ‘science’ of linguistics and the ‘cultural practice’ of Traditional Lexicography and Grammar.

Machine Learning in Terminology Extraction from Czech and English Texts

2022-08-02T10:47:25+00:00

The method of automatic term recognition based on machine learning is focused primarily on the most important quantitative term attributes. It is able to successfully identify terms and non-terms (with success rate of more than 95%) and find characteristic features of a term as a terminological unit. A single-word term can be characterized as a word with a low frequency that occurs considerably more often in specialized texts than in non-academic texts, occurs in a small number of disciplines, its distribution in the corpus is uneven as is the distance between its two instances. A multi-word term is a collocation consisting of words with low frequency and contains at least one single-word term. The method is based on quantitative features and it makes it possible to utilize the algorithms in multiple disciplines as well as to create cross-lingual applications (verified on Czech and English).

Grammatical Tenses and Communicative Intentions

2022-08-02T11:01:09+00:00

Recent research in syntax and corpus linguistics has shown how the German Perfekt (present perfect) and Präteritum (simple past) are widely used in written language—even though these tenses are commonly described in DAF (German as a foreign language) materials as used respectively in the spoken and written forms. While these analyses only focus on written corpora, an extensive study on the use of tenses in spoken interaction is still missing. In this paper, I try to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the use of Perfekt and Präteritum in the recordings of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, held in Frankfurt am Main, from December 20, 1963, to August 19, 1965, and available on the web page of the Fritz Bauer Institute. Textual analyses of the depositions of five former German prisoners of the Polish concentration camp show that German native speakers use both tenses in their spoken interactions. These results widely contradict their depiction in DAF materials, textbooks, and grammars. Furthermore, the types of Präteritum found are far more diverse than is traditionally held by scholars, who claimed that the use of this tense in spoken language is limited to verbs such as sein (to be), haben (to have) and modals, such as können (can), müssen (must), sollen (should), etc. The outcome of this study shows how the difference between Perfekt and Präteritum is determined by the subjective attitude of the speakers in relation to the information they want to convey.

Migrant images

2022-08-02T11:12:40+00:00

This paper addresses the migration theme as an embodied experience performed by myself in two installation pieces, which serve as examples to explore the notions of displacement and territory in phenomenology and semiotic of culture points of view. A mode of performed narrative within moving images attempts to imagine other existences, through cognition and body studies. Presence and politics in ageless aesthetic forms amplify a performativity experience in body and image, related to Greek Hellenic sites and Brazilian countryside landscapes. How do the visual arts act as both a reenactment of a continuous present through affected sites and a dramaturgy of the moving image, through a migrant body in continuous creation of belonging in unknown lands and seas?

Second-generation semiology and detotalization

2021-04-25T17:37:44+00:00

The fashionable disavowal of structural semiology as logocentric is easily countered by a review of the important innovations of second-generation semiology, spearheaded by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. The scope of Saussurean semiology is hampered only by its reliance upon alphabetic language and presence grounded in the voice; the assertion that semiology is a part of linguistics, rather than the reverse, does not reject the existence of nonlinguistic meaning; wordplay and textual experimentation are no mere stylistic ornamentation, but are on the contrary the key strategy of second-generation semiology for exposing the limitations of language. All three of these writers rely upon the glossematics of Louis Hjelmslev for the articulation of the concrete, non-logocentric object of general linguistics – his stratification of the Saussurean sign provides the centerpiece for the synthetic theoretical model introduced here.

Explain the law

2022-08-02T11:25:36+00:00

The article responds to the current variability of research into linguistic laws and the explanation of these laws. We show basic features to approach linguistic laws in the field of quantitative linguistics and research on linguistic laws outside the field of language and text. Language laws are usually explained in terms of the language system—especially as economizing—or of the information structure of the text (Piantadosi 2014). One of the hallmarks of the transmission of linguistic laws outside the realm of language and text is that they provide other kinds of explanations (Torre et al. 2019). We want to show that the problem of linguistics in the explanation of linguistic laws lies primarily in its inability to clarify the internal structure of language material, and the influence of the theory or method used for sample processing on the result of law analysis—which was formulated by Peter Grzybek (2006). We would like to show that this is the reason why linguistics avoids explanations of linguistic laws.