Patrícia Amaral Research Collection

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/24546

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    Word embeddings and semantic shifts in historical Spanish: Methodological considerations
    (Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021-08-25) Hu, Hai; Amaral, Patrícia; Kübler, Sandra
    Word embeddings have recently been applied to detect and explore changes in word meaning on large historical corpora. While word embeddings are useful in many Natural Language Processing tasks, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed concerning accuracy and applicability of these methods for historical data. There is scarce literature on the stability and replicability of these embeddings, especially on small corpora, which are common in historical work. It also remains unclear whether methods used to evaluate embeddings in contemporary data can also be used for historical data sets. Our overarching goal is to use word embeddings for investigating semantic shifts in the history of Spanish. In the work presented here, we focus on methodological questions that arise: We first examine the stability and applicability of three commonly used word embedding models on a small corpus of medieval and classical Spanish. Comparing our results with a study on the word algo as a test case, we show that a rank-averaging method can produce more stable results from the embeddings. We corroborate previous theoretical work while demonstrating the applicability of our method when training word embeddings on small corpora for the analysis of semantic change. Second, we investigate how best to evaluate different embeddings models. We show that an existing analogy test cannot be used without modification. Our new analogy test, consisting of roughly ten thousand questions for medieval and classical Spanish, will be released with the article.
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    Expressive meaning
    (Springer/ Metzler, 2018) Amaral, Patrícia
    The term expressivity or expressive meaning has a long tradition in linguistics. Roman Jakobson, building on an earlier proposal by Bühler (1934), coined the term expressive or emotive for one of the functions of language. He describes it as “focused on the ADDRESSER [speaker], aims a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about” (Jakobson 1960: 354) and gives interjections as the prime example of this function. The separation between emotive language and referential (or descriptive) language is clear in his characterization of interjections: “they are not components but equivalents of sentences” (Jakobson 1960: 354). Although there is significant overlap between this definition and later ones, later proposals, starting with Cruse (1986), focus on diagnostics that underlie the distinction between expressive meaning and descriptive or truth conditional meaning, i.e. meaning that can be explicitly denied and objectively verified in the actual world (Lyons 1977).
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    When "something" becomes "a bit"
    (Diachronica: International Journal of Historical Linguistics, 2016-08-11) Amaral, Patrícia
    This paper analyzes the mechanisms of syntactic and semantic change involved in the development of the degree modifier algo 'a bit' from an indefinite pronoun meaning 'something' in Spanish, from the Medieval to the Classical period. It focuses both on the structural conditions for the reanalysis of the pronoun in pseudo-partitive constructions and on the pragmatic inferences licensed by its quantificational and indefinite meaning. This diachronic development is studied against the background of cross-linguistic tendencies in the distribution of degree modifiers, thus providing a historical perspective on the cross-categorial nature of gradability.
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    Cultural identity and the structure of a mixed language: The case of Barranquenho
    (Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2008-02) Clements, J. Clancy; Amaral, Patrícia; Luís, Ana
    The origins of Barranquenho, a contact variety of Portuguese spoken by the roughly 2000 inhabitants of Barrancos, Portugal go back at least 150 years and probably more. In this paper, we give a brief sociohistorical overview of the Barrancos area, address how Barranquenho emerged, and discuss some of its distinctive features. We also offer a proposal regarding what the nature of Barranquenho may have to offer to the mixed language debate.
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    Discourse and Scalar Structure in Non-Canonical Negation
    (Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2009-11-01) Amaral, Patrícia; Schwenter, Scott Adam
    This paper combines two strands of research: (i) the study of the discourse contextual requirements on the use of non-canonical negative forms, and (ii) research on what has recently been termed the “permeable polar membrane” (Horn 2008) of approximative adverbs like English almost and barely. As regards the first, cross-linguistic studies have shown that non-canonical sentential negatives are licensed under particular discourse conditions that relate to information structure (Fretheim 1984, Espinal 1993, Zanuttini 1997, Kaiser 2006, Schwenter 2005, 2006). Regarding the second, it has been observed that the polar component of approximative adverbs is more open to contextual flexibility than their proximal component (see Li 1976, Horn 2002, Schwenter 2002, Amaral 2007 a.o.). In this paper, we focus on the negative readings of two approximative adverbs, Engl. hardly and European Portuguese (henceforth EP) mal ‘barely, hardly,’ and argue that their “strengthened” negative interpretations can be fleshed out in terms of constraints on the discourse structure. In our proposal, we build both on the licensing conditions of non-canonical negatives and on the scalar meaning of approximative adverbs. The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 1, we present the Conjunctive Analysis of approximative adverbs and introduce the canonical and inverted readings of these forms. In section 2, we briefly review the literature on the licensing conditions of non-canonical negatives. Section 3 details the distribution of the inverted readings of Engl. hardly and EP mal and section 4 proposes the constraints on discourse structure effected by these inverted readings. Section 5 provides concluding remarks.
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    Learning cues to category membership: Patterns in children’s acquisition of hedges
    (Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2013) Casillas, Marisa; Amaral, Patrícia
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    Nominal and verbal plurality in the diachrony of the Portuguese Present Perfect
    (Mouton de Gruyter, 2012) Amaral, Patrícia; Howe, Chad
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    Children’s knowledge of scales in the acquisition of almost
    (Mouton de Gruyter, 2013-03) Amaral, Patrícia
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    Contrast and the (non-) occurrence of subject pronouns
    (Selected Proceedings of the 7th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 2005) Amaral, Patrícia; Schwenter, Scott Adam
    It is well-established that one of the main communicative functions of subject pronouns (SPs) in pro-drop languages like Spanish or European Portuguese is to mark contrast. Moreover, for many researchers the occurrence of SPs in contrastive contexts is considered obligatory; however, the supposed obligatory nature of SPs in contrastive contexts has never been questioned in the literature. It is demonstrated that the occurrence of overt SPs in certain contrastive contexts is not necessarily obligatory. Thus, no special contrastive function should be ascribed to SPs; they are just one means, albeit a frequent one, to overtly index contrast in discourse.
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    The puzzle of quasi prima ‘almost before’ and quasi dopo ‘almost after’
    (Proceedings of SALT, 2009-04) Amaral, Patrícia; Del Prete, Fabio
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    Where’s the meeting that was cancelled? Existential implications of transitive verbs
    (Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALex-III), 2012-12) Amaral, Patrícia; de Paiva, Valeria; Condoravdi, Cleo; Zaenen, Annie
    This paper describes a preliminary classification of transitive verbs in terms of the implications of existence (or non-existence) associated with their direct object nominal arguments. The classification was built to underlie the lexical marking of verbs in the lexical resources that the automated system BRIDGE developed at Xerox PARC used for textual inference. Similar classifications are required for other logic-based textual inference systems, but very little is written about the issue.
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    On how to live and keep dying
    (Selected Proceedings of the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium 2011, 2013) Amaral, Patrícia
    This paper focuses on a verbal periphrasis of Brazilian Portuguese formed with the verb viver 'to live' + V[Gerund], 'to keep V-ing', and provides an analysis of its meaning. On the basis of the syntactic and semantic properties of the periphrasis, it is shown that it is a monoclausal construction with a single complex predicate. The meaning of viver + V[Gerund] is analyzed in terms of eventuality modification and pluractionality, specifically as a frequentative operator, building on the analysis of verbal periphrases formed with verbs of motion in Spanish proposed by Laca (2004, 2006).
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    Experimental investigations of the typology of presupposition triggers
    (Humana Mente, 2012-12-02) Cummins, Chris; Amaral, Patrícia; Katsos, Napoleon
    The behaviour of presupposition triggers in human language has been extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals. One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may not be challenged or refuted by discourse participants. However, there are a wide range of presupposition triggers, some of which can systematically be used to introduce new information. Is there, then, a clear psychological distinction between presupposition and assertion? Do certain expressions vacillate between presupposing and asserting information? And is information backgrounding a categorical or a gradient phenomenon? In this paper we argue for the value of experimental methods in addressing these questions, and present a pilot study demonstrating backgrounding effects of presupposition triggers, and suggesting their gradience in nature. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical categorisations of presupposition triggers.
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    Not a fact: A synchronic analysis of el hecho de and o facto de
    (Probus: International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics, 2019-05-10) Amaral, Patrícia; Cantero, Manuel D.
    This paper provides empirical evidence showing that the clause-taking nominals el hecho de (Spanish) and o facto de (Portuguese) are not reliable tests of factivity of predicates, as commonly assumed in the literature. Naturally occurring data from both languages show that these nominals are compatible with a wide range of predicates and that they occur in sentences with both factive and non-factive interpretations. Our findings contribute to the debate on the syntactic and semantic properties of clause-taking nominal constructions, clausal nominalization in Ibero-Romance, and to current research on the nature of factivity.
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    Entailment, assertion, and textual coherence: the case of almost and barely
    (Linguistics, 2010-06-17) Amaral, Patrícia
    This article contributes to the study of approximative adverbs almost and barely by providing psycholinguistic evidence for the asymmetry of their meaning components. The experiments reported are discussed against the background of a set of tests targeting the theoretical status of the meaning components. The first experiment addresses the role played by each meaning component in textual coherence, whereas the second experiment addresses the interpretation in isolation of a sentence containing an approximative adverb. The results argue for a pragmatic difference in the role of the meaning components, along the lines of Horn's (Assertoric inertia and NPI licensing: 55–82, 2002) proposal, pertaining to the way in which the implications of approximative adverbs contribute to context update.