A Computational Phonology of Russian

A Computational Phonology of Russian
Author: Peter Chew
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2003
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1581121784

This dissertation provides a coherent, synchronic, broad-coverage, generative phonology of Russian. I test the grammar empirically in a number of ways to determine its goodness of fit to Russian. In taking this approach, I aim to avoid making untested (or even incoherent) generalizations based on only a handful of examples. In most cases, the tests show that there are exceptions to the theory, but at least we know what the exceptions are, a baseline is set against which future theories can be measured, and in most cases the percentage of exceptional cases is reduced to below 5%. The principal theoretical outcomes of the work are as follows. First, I show that all of the phonological or morphophonological processes reviewed can be described by a grammar no more powerful than context-free. Secondly, I exploit probabilistic constraints in the syllable structure grammar to explain why constraints on word-marginal onsets and codas are weaker than on word-internal onsets and codas. I argue that the features []/- initial] and []/- final], and extraprosodicity, are unnecessary for this purpose.

The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics

The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics
Author: Ruslan Mitkov
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1312
Release: 2022-05-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0191625531

Ruslan Mitkov's highly successful Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics has been substantially revised and expanded in this second edition. Alongside updated accounts of the topics covered in the first edition, it includes 17 new chapters on subjects such as semantic role-labelling, text-to-speech synthesis, translation technology, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, and the application of Natural Language Processing in educational and biomedical contexts, among many others. The volume is divided into four parts that examine, respectively: the linguistic fundamentals of computational linguistics; the methods and resources used, such as statistical modelling, machine learning, and corpus annotation; key language processing tasks including text segmentation, anaphora resolution, and speech recognition; and the major applications of Natural Language Processing, from machine translation to author profiling. The book will be an essential reference for researchers and students in computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing, as well as those working in related industries.

University Theses in Russian, Soviet and East European Studies, 1907-2006

University Theses in Russian, Soviet and East European Studies, 1907-2006
Author: Gregory Piers Mountford Walker
Publisher: MHRA
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2008
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0947623809

The bibliography records doctoral and selected masters' theses (over 3,300 in all) from British and Irish universities in the field of Russian, Soviet and East European studies. This is broadly interpreted to include all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences as they relate to the area of Russia, the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Taken as a whole, the work probably forms the fullest and longest record of British and Irish postgraduate research in any sector of area studies. Besides its primary function as a bibliographic tool, it makes it possible to trace the effects of academic developments, institutional policies, and the changes in direction in this highly diversified field of study over the last hundred years. Entries are arranged by subject and area, supported by full author and subject indexes to aid searching. Dr Gregory Walker is a former Head of Slavonic and East European Collections at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The late John S.G. Simmons, OBE, was Senior Research Fellow and Librarian, All Souls College, Oxford.

Russian

Russian
Author: Paul Cubberley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2002-10-17
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780521796415

This book provides an accessible introduction to the linguistic structure of Russian, including its history, dialects and sociolinguistics, as well as the central issues of phonology, morphology, syntax and word formation/lexicology. It particularly emphasises the special linguistic features of Russian which are not shared with English and other non-Slavic languages. For intermediate/advanced students of Russian, this will help to reinforce their understanding of how all levels of Russian function. Students and scholars of linguistics will find it a useful starting point for comparative work involving the structure of Russian and the Slavic languages, or issues such as standardisation, multilingualism, and the fate of former colonial languages. Each chapter begins with an introduction to the basic theoretical concepts of the area covered, presenting the linguistic facts and relationships in an easily accessible form. It will also serve as a learning aid to Cyrillic, with all examples transliterated.

The Segment in Phonetics and Phonology

The Segment in Phonetics and Phonology
Author: Eric Raimy
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2015-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1118555406

The Segment in Phonetics and Phonology unravels exactly what the segment is and on what levels it exists, approaching the study of the segment with theoretical, empirical, and methodological heterogeneity as its guiding principle. A deliberately eclectic approach to the study of the segment that investigates exactly what the segment is and on what level it exists Includes new research data from a diverse range of fields such as experimental psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and mathematical theories of communication Represents the major theoretical models of phonology, including Articulatory Phonology, Optimality Theory, Laboratory Phonology and Generative Phonology Examines both well-studied languages like English, Chinese, and Japanese and under-studied languages such as Southern Sierra Miwok, Päri, and American Sign Language

Explaining Russian-German code-mixing

Explaining Russian-German code-mixing
Author: Nikolay Hakimov
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961103305

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking.

A Computational Theory of Writing Systems

A Computational Theory of Writing Systems
Author: Richard William Sproat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2000-07-03
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780521663403

This book develops a formal computational theory of writing systems. It offers specific proposals about the linguistic objects that are represented by orthographic elements; what levels of linguistic representation are involved and how they may differ across writing systems; and what formal constraints hold of the mapping relation between linguistic and orthographic elements. Based on the insights gained, Sproat then proposes a taxonomy of writing systems. The treatment of theoretical linguistic issues and their computational implementation is complemented with discussion of empirical psycholinguistic work on reading and its relevance for the computational model developed here. Throughout, the model is illustrated with a number of detailed case studies of writing systems around the world. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in a variety of fields, including theoretical and computational linguistics, the psycholinguistics of reading and writing, and speech technology.

Russian verbal prefixation

Russian verbal prefixation
Author: Yulia Zinova
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 396
Release:
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102988

This book addresses the complexity of Russian verbal prefixation system that has been extensively studied but yet not explained. Traditionally, different meanings have been investigated and listed in the dictionaries and grammars and more recently linguists attempted to unify various prefix usages under more general descriptions. The existent semantic approaches, however, do not aim to use semantic representations in order to account for the problems of prefix stacking and aspect determination. This task has been so far undertaken by syntactic approaches to prefixation, that divide verbal prefixes in classes and limit complex verb formation by restricting structural positions available for the members of each class. I show that these approaches have two major drawbacks: the implicit prediction of the non-existence of complex biaspectual verbs and the absence of uniformly accepted formal criteria for the underlying prefix classification. In this book the reader can find an implementable formal semantic approach to prefixation that covers five prefixes: za-, na-, po-, pere-, and do-. It is shown how to predict the existence, semantics, and aspect of a given complex verb with the help of the combination of an LTAG and frame semantics. The task of identifying the possible affix combinations is distributed between three modules: syntax, which is kept simple (only basic structural assumptions), frame semantics, which ensures that the constraints are respected, and pragmatics, which rules out some prefixed verbs and restricts the range of available interpretations. For the purpose of the evaluation of the theory, an implementation of the proposed analysis for a grammar fragment using a metagrammar description is provided. It is shown that the proposed analysis delivers more accurate and complete predictions with respect to the existence of complex verbs than the most precise syntactic account.

The Mehweb language

The Mehweb language
Author: Michael Daniel
Publisher: Language Science Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2019-10-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3961102082

This book is an investigation into the grammar of Mehweb (Dargwa, East Caucasian also known as Nakh-Daghestanian) based on several years of team fieldwork. Mehweb is spoken in one village community in Daghestan, Russia, with a population of some 800 people, In many ways, Mehweb is a typical East Caucasian language: it has a rich inventory of consonants; an extensive system of spatial forms in nouns and converbs and volitional forms in verbs; pervasive gender-number agreement; and ergative alignment in case marking and in gender agreement. It is also a typical language of the Dargwa branch, with symmetrical verb inflection in the imperfective and perfective paradigm and extensive use of spatial encoding for experiencers. Although Mehweb is clearly close to the northern varieties of Dargwa, it has been long isolated from the main body of Dargwa varieties by speakers of Avar and Lak. As a result of both independent internal evolution and contact with its neighbours, Mehweb developed some deviant properties, including accusatively aligned egophoric agreement, a split in the feminine class, and the typologically rare grammatical categories of verificative and apprehensive. But most importantly, Mehweb is where our friends live.

The Oxford History of Phonology

The Oxford History of Phonology
Author: B. Elan Dresher
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 872
Release: 2022
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198796803

This volume is the first to provide an up-to-date and comprehensive history of phonology from the earliest known examples of phonological thinking, through the rise of phonology as a field in the twentieth century, and up to the most recent advances. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I offers an account of writing systems along with chapters exploring the great ancient and medieval intellectual traditions of phonological thought that form the foundation of later thinking and continue to enrich phonological theory. Chapters in Part II describe the important schools and individuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who shaped phonology as an organized scientific field. Part III examines mid-twentieth century developments in phonology in the Soviet Union, Northern and Western Europe, and North America; it continues with precursors to generative grammar, and culminates in a chapter on Chomsky and Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (SPE). Part IV then shows how phonological theorists responded to SPE with respect to derivations, representations, and phonology-morphology interaction. Theories discussed include Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology, Constraint-and-Repair theories, and Optimality Theory. The part ends with a chapter on the study of variation. Finally, chapters in Part V look at new methods and approaches, covering phonetic explanation, corpora and phonological analysis, probabilistic phonology, computational modelling, models of phonological learning, and the evolution of phonology. This in-depth exploration of the history of phonology provides new perspectives on where phonology has been and sheds light on where it could go next.