Functionality of the adverb “contrarily” in adnominal position

The object of this research is the adverb “contrarily” adjacent to the noun. The goal of this article is to indicate the peculiarities of functionality of the adverb in this position. It is established that the adverb “contrarily” is characterized by adjunction to nouns of substantive semantics and proper names, as well as nouns of abstract semantics. The use of this adverb as a characteristic of an object or phenomenon requires explanation, which is usually given in the preceding or subsequent context. The adverb “contrarily” or a substantive-adverbial combination as a whole is often enclosed in quotation marks. This underlines the irregular method selected by the speaker for describing an object or phenomenon using an adjacent adverb. This article is the first to analyze the peculiarities of functionality of the adverb “contrarily” in adnominal position. The article employs the Russian National Corpus for collecting the material; the analysis of language material is based on the method of continuous sampling. The adnominal use of the adverb “contrarily” in associated with the absence of a special lexeme for denoting the described object of speech. The acquired results contribute to the theoretical description of adverbs as part of speech, and can be used in teaching morphology, syntax and semantics in the course of modern Russian language, as well as in teaching Russian as a foreign language.

Russian prefixed verbs as constructional schemas

This study tests the morphological gradience theory on Russian prefixed verbs. With the help of a specially designed experiment, in which participants were asked to evaluate the semantic transparency of a prefixed nonse verb given in minimal context, as well as to semanticise it by suggesting an existing Russian verb with the same prefix, we offer evidence that these verbs can be analysed as constructional schemas and that the degree of their morphological decomposition depends upon the different levels of activation of their sequential and lexical links. We prove that speakers of Russian are very sensitive to the etymological connection between verb prefixes and the prepositions they are related to. Thus, prefix-stem constructions with prefixes that correspond to prepositions are more likely to be morphologically decomposed, while prefix-stem constructions with prefixes that do not relate to prepositions tend to be regarded as single lexical units. Moreover, the general, highly abstract semantics of Russian prefix-stem constructions, especially of those that retain their ‘prepositional’ meaning, is undoubtedly accessible to language users, which is confirmed by the fact that the interpretability of these constructions is affected by priming.

Acquisition of concrete and abstract words is modulated by tDCS of Wernicke’s area

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging research suggested distinct cortical systems involved in processing abstract and concrete semantics; however, there is a dearth of causal evidence to support this. To address this, we applied anodal, cathodal, or sham (placebo) tDCS over Wernicke’s area before a session of contextual learning of novel concrete and abstract words (n = 10 each), presented five times in short stories. Learning effects were assessed at lexical and semantic levels immediately after the training and, to attest any consolidation effects of overnight sleep, on the next day. We observed successful learning of all items immediately after the session, with decreased performance in Day 2 assessment. Importantly, the results differed between stimulation conditions and tasks. Whereas the accuracy of semantic judgement for abstract words was significantly lower in the sham and anodal groups on Day 2 vs. Day 1, no significant performance drop was observed in the cathodal group. Similarly, the cathodal group showed no significant overnight performance reduction in the free recall task for either of the stimuli, unlike the other two groups. Furthermore, between-group analysis showed an overall better performance of both tDCS groups over the sham group, particularly expressed for abstract semantics and cathodal stimulation. In sum, the results suggest overlapping but diverging brain mechanisms for concrete and abstract semantics and indicate a larger degree of involvement of core language areas in storing abstract knowledge. Furthermore, they demonstrate a possiblity to improve learning outcomes using neuromodulatory techniques.

Abstract Interpretation over Zones without Widening

We present a practical algorithm for computing leastsolutions of systems of (fixpoint-)equations over the integers with,besides other monotone operators,addition, multiplication by positive constants, maximum, and minimum.The algorithm is based on max-strategy iteration.Its worst-case running-time (w.r.t. a uniform cost measure)is independent of the sizes of occurring numbers.We apply thisalgorithm to compute the abstract semantics ofprograms over integer intervals as well as over integer zones.