The Entropy of Words—Learnability and Expressivity across More than 1000 Languages

The Entropy of Words - Learnability and Expressivity across More than 1000 Languages

The choice associated with words is a fundamental property of natural languages. It lies at the heart of quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics, and language sciences more generally. Information-theory gives us tools at hand to measure precisely the average amount of choice associated with words – the word entropy. Here we use three parallel corpora – encompassing ca. 450 million w...

Metacognitive (Rending) Strategies Across Languages and Techniques

a comparative pragmatic analysis of the speech act of “disagreement” across english and persian

the speech act of disagreement has been one of the speech acts that has received the least attention in the field of pragmatics. this study investigates the ways power relations, social distance, formality of the context, gender, and language proficiency (for efl learners) influence disagreement and politeness strategies. the participants of the study were 200 male and female native persian s...

Additivity dominance: Additives are more potent and more often lexicalized across languages than are “subtractives”

Judgments of naturalness of foods tend to be more influenced by the process history of a food, rather than its actual constituents. Two types of processing of a “natural” food are to add something or to remove something. We report in this study, based on a large random sample of individuals from six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, UK and USA) that additives are considered defini...

efl students gender and socioeconomic status: the use of politeness strategies in the first and second languages

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as ...