In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related languages and therefore, diachronic language change. Applying these algorithms to the data on the numbers of shared cognateswith-change and changed as well as u...

This study is a quantitative and functional corpus-based study of self-mention in soft science Master theses. One important purpose of this study was to find out the functions of self-mention in soft science Master theses. For this purpose, 20 soft science Master theses in four disciplines (Applied linguistics, Psychology, Geography, and Political sciences), were randomly selected out of the li...

Corpus Linguistics is one of the fastest emerging language teaching methods in modern applied linguistics. Several studies have been carried out to study the effectiveness of using Corpus Linguistics to comprehend the dynamics of language learning and to harness the benefits of learning a language though corpus based approach. This paper examines some of the significant studies on Corpus Lingui...

Success of engineered systems and devices is contingent upon their approval by expert committees. For example, advisory panels to the Food and Drug Administration make crucial recommendations regarding the approval and diffusion of medical devices in the United States. Systems and devices are subject to opinions and institutional bias that might drive decision outcomes in an unfavorable directi...

Considering the fact that engagement with political economy is central to any fully rounded analysis of language and language-related issues in the neoliberal-stricken world today, and that applied linguistics has ignored the role of political economy (Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012),  for the first time, this study investigated the representations of neoliberal ideologies in the Interchange Thi...

The explosion in the creation of text corpora in recent years suggests that the opportunity may be ripe to examine quantitative techniques for their value in semantics. The present paper aims to explore one quantitative technique with an eye toward its potential value in illuminating questions of semantic theory. It is exploratory in nature, and it will not offer definite conclusions or specifi...

The increasing complexity of legal systems has many origins, which are worth a deeper analysis. This paper is an attempt to unveil the complexity in legal texts driven by structural, lexical and syntactical properties. Thereby we transferred established quantitative methods from structural network analysis and linguistics into the domain of legal text analysis. Based on 3 553 German laws, respe...

A novel combination of ideas from cognitive linguistics and spatial occupancy models in robotics has led to the WIP (Words Into Pictures) system. WIP automatically generates depictions of natural language descriptions of indoor scenes. A qualitative layer in the conceptual representation of objects underlies a mechanism by which alternative depictions arise for qualitatively distinct interpreta...