Measuring meaning is a central problem in cultural sociology and word embeddings may offer powerful new tools to do so. But like any tool, they build on and exert theoretical assumptions. In this paper, I theorize the ways in which word embeddings model three core premises of a structural linguistic theory of meaning: that meaning is coherent,…

Given that both spoken and written language are subject to corruption from speech errors, disfluencies, and environmental noise, successful language comprehension sometimes requires deriving a non-veridical understanding of the linguistic input. Recent work has demonstrated that these non-veridical understandings are not merely semantic, but that,…

Producing written texts is a non-linear process: in contrast to speech, writers are free to change already written text at any place at any point in time. Linguistic considerations are likely to play an important role, but so far, no linguistic models of the writing process exist. We present an approach for the analysis of writing processes with a…

Many studies have utilized standardized measures and storybook narratives to characterize language profiles of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). They report that structural language of these children is on par with mental-age-matched typically developing (TD) peers. Few studies have…

A tension exists between rationalists and empiricists regarding the nature of knowledge: innate then activated/discovered (rationalists) or constructed then invented (empiricists). The assumption is that, to a certain extent, basic knowledge seems to be innate in our mind and develops through experience by thinking processes to construct meanings.…

Previous studies found that linguistic features can be used to predict the success of novels. However, which specific linguistic features better contribute to a novel's popularity is unclear. This study addressed this issue by investigating the linguistic features of 2,008 online Chinese fantasy novels with different popularity (indicated by the…

The article revisits the canonical (Dem>Num>A>N) and non-canonical (A>Dem>Num>N & Dem>A>Num>N) prenominal patterns in Mandarin Chinese, from the perspective of the Labeling Algorithm. It shows that the syntactic distribution of adjectives are different, depending on the attributive-predicative sources and the…

Pidgins, narrowly defined, are auxiliary languages reserved for communication with linguistic outgroups. Although implicitly recognized as a class of languages by many linguists, there has been little systematic typological investigation of pidgins. This dissertation presents the first large-scale typological study of morphology and functional…

The Book of Mormon is a text published in 1830 and considered a sacred work of scripture by adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement. Although written 200 years later, it exhibits many linguistic features of the King James translation of the Bible. Such stylistic imitation has been little studied, though a notable exception is Sigelman &…

This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking…

In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize social communication and structural language of school-age girls with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HF-ASD) compared to a matched group of girls who are typically developing (TD). Method: Participants were 37 girls between 7;5 and 15;2 (years;months)--18 HF-ASD and 19 TD. Children…

Existential negation is the one type of negation present in languages, which its item is called "negative existential", and it provides to tell the case of "absence", "lack", "there is not", "poor", "empty", "dead" etc. Negative existentials are generally used for the common…

The intricate and tricky case of semantic analysis, especially of the enigmatic realm of nouns, the red thread of linguistics and literary exploration. This academic research explores the rich sphere of Russian literature in-depth to determine connections between function and the embodiment of theme through proper names. This research is aiming at…

This study sheds light on the relation between assessment modalities and student behavior through linguistics styles, and academic performance. First, we examine the effect of assessment modalities (self-evaluation quizzes and summative quizzes) on academic performance. Using two modalities of online quizzes, we mainly focus on the student…