Bức tranh ngôn ngữ về thế giới - đặc trưng văn hoá - tư duy cộng đồng ngôn ngữ

The linguistic worldview is formed in the daily perception of a language community. It is the overall image of the world which is reflected in language, it is the mode of accessing and the worldwide structure, it is the practical conceptualization. In the relations with cultural characteristics – community thinking, it can be considered from many sides, especially the world's division of a community through vocabulary of language. Statistics, comparisons, comparisons of identifying words have reflected the world’s division of a community.Dividing the world into meaning pieces of words has created the diversity of thinking and community culture. On the one hand, it has had a great influence on the formation of language; on the other hand it has brought the richness of thinking and culture which also makes the distinctions in the lexical meaning of words.

Language, or Dialect, That Is the Question. How Attitudes Affect Language Statistics Using the Example of Low German

This paper explores how attitudes affect the seemingly objective process of counting speakers of varieties using the example of Low German, Germany’s sole regional language. The initial focus is on the basic taxonomy of classifying a variety as a language or a dialect. Three representative surveys then provide data for the analysis: the Germany Survey 2008, the Northern Germany Survey 2016, and the Germany Survey 2017. The results of these surveys indicate that there is no consensus concerning the evaluation of Low German’s status and that attitudes towards Low German are related to, for example, proficiency in the language. These attitudes are shown to matter when counting speakers of Low German and investigating the status it has been accorded.

Tuning to Real-Life Language Statistics: Online Processing of Multiword Sequences in Native and Non-Native Speakers Across Language Registers

A large body of research over the past two decades has demonstrated that children and adults are equipped with statistical learning mechanisms that facilitate their language processing and boost their acquisition. However, this research has been conducted primarily using artificial languages that are highly simplified relative to real language input. Here, we aimed to determine to what extent adult native and non-native speakers show sensitivity to real-life language statistics obtained from large-scale analyses of authentic language use. Through a within-subject design, we conducted a series of behavioral experiments geared towards assessing the sensitivity to two types of distributional statistics (frequency and entropy) during online processing of multiword sequences across four registers of English (spoken, fiction, news and academic language). Our results show that both native and non-native speakers are able to `tune to' multiple distributional statistics inherent in different types of real language input.

Cortical maps recovered from language statistics

Large-scale linguistic data is nowadays available in abundance. Here, we demonstrate that the surface-level statistical structure of language alone opens a window into how our brain represents the world. To this end, we examine the statistical occurrence of words referring to body parts in very different languages, covering nearly 4 billions of native speakers. Our findings indicate that the human body as extracted from language resembles the distorted human-like figure known as the sensory homunculus, whose form depicts the amount of cortical area dedicated to somatosensory functions of each body part. This links the way conceptual knowledge is represented and communicated in language to how the brain processes information from the sensory systems.

Jesus Christ’s Speeches in Maria Valtorta’s Mystical Writings: Setting, Topics, Duration and Deep-Language Mathematical Analysis

We have studied Jesus Christ’s speeches contained in The Gospel as revealed to me by Maria Valtorta to assess: (i) similarities and differences of the speeches delivered to diverse audiences, through deep-language statistics; (ii) duration of the speeches delivered in different occasions; (iii) whether the setting of the speeches is realistic. Mathematically, the speeches can be divided into two sets: (a) two apparently well-planned and coordinated series of speeches delivered at “Clear Water” and at the Horns of Hattin (Sermon of the Mountain); (b) extempore speeches delivered in many localities (parables, speeches to people or to disciples, in Synagogues, at the Temple). By converting sequences of words into intervals, through a suitable reading/speaking speed, the speeches’ durations were found to be realistic. The setting of the speeches allows the assessment of the likelihood of the places and occasions for delivering them. Maria Valtorta wrote extraordinary speeches that she attributed to the alleged Jesus of Nazareth. In addition to their theological and doctrinal contents (whose study is far beyond the scope of this paper), the speeches are so realistic in whatever mathematical parameter, or setting, we study them, that she is either a great literary author, or—as she claims—an attentive “eyewitness” of what she reports.

It’s all about English: the interplay of monolingual ideologies, language policies and the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on multilingualism

In this article, I argue that census language questions, policies and ideologies are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Thus, critical analyses of census language questions must examine the specific policies for which language statistics are produced, as well as the ideologies that undergird those policies and the production of language statistics. After examining the history of language questions and related policies in the U.S., I apply this approach in an analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s current language question, arguing that U.S. language policy and official statistics on multilingualism are constrained by monolingual ideologies that center on English as the key point of reference and the marker of full personhood and national belonging. My analysis focuses on four interrelated realms: (1) U.S. language policy and its emphasis on “Limited English Proficiency” in assigning language rights; (2) the broader ideological context; (3) the language question itself; and (4) the impact of language ideologies on survey design and data collection within the U.S. Census Bureau.