Identifying the Problems EFL Students Encounter in Translating Adverbs from English into Arabic

While discussing the grammatical problems EFL learners confront in translating between languages, especially in translating adverbs as a basic category in English Grammar, it is significantly highlighting the difficulties these learners encounter and justifying the errors they make when translating adverbs and adverbial phrases from English into Arabic. Obviously, the errors are due to the fact that both languages at hand belong to two sharply distant language families and systems. In other words, language is culture-specific; what might be in one, might not be the same in the other, this leads to the ambiguity and misunderstanding of adverbs real contextual meaning, resulting the displacement of adverbs within sentences. Besides, Arab learners of English are sufficiently competent of English language and culture, thus English adverbs system and adverbial order, and their counterparts in Arabic which in turn affect their translation into their native. The study, therefore, suggests some strategies to be employed by Arab learners when translating English adverbs into Arabic. However, it is hypothesized that EFL students at the undergraduate level have confusion in understanding the adverbs contextual meaning or in other words their sentential meaning, thus err when translating these adverbs from English into Arabic. To prove the hypotheses of the study, two tests, of five sentences each, are set for fifty randomly chosen students at the undergraduate level to do; the first test is set to re-place the adverbs properly within sentences; whereas the second is set to translate English adverbs into Arabic contextually. Then the data of the study are analyzed and the results of the tests are evaluated to show how sentence meaning is affected by the misplacement and mistranslation of adverbs and adverbial phrases. In addition, to prove that the deficiencies in translation are due to the dissimilarities between English and Arabic adverbs meaning and order, and Arabic learner

Meaning and Meaning Making in Arabic: Moving from Semantics to Pragmatics to Ka:rmatics

Ka:rmik Linguistic theory is one of the most revolutionary theories in linguistics which aims to describe language from a causal perspective of WHY giving rise to WHAT through HOW: “As you are, so you think; as you think, so you speak (or act)” (Bhuvaneswar). In an adapted form, it can be modified as: As you are, so you think; as you think, so you mean. In his extension of semantics to ka:rmatics in dealing with proverb-meaning, Bhuvaneswar (2012) has shown a new dimension of meaning and meaning-making, namely, the causal dimension of creation, change, and transformation of meaning in language. According to Bhuvaneswar, if semantics deals with sentence meaning and pragmatics with utterance meaning, ka:rmatics (i.e., experiential pragmatics) explores experiential meaning via dispositional meaning of contextual meaning (pragmatics) of sentential meaning (semantics). What this amounts to is a causal understanding of meaning as it is created, changed, and transformed as languages are evolved and developed: Language is as it is (i.e., lingual meaning is as it is) because of what it is (dispositionally) intended to do (i.e., to mean) what it does (i.e., means). In this paper, an attempt has been made by selecting two sentences used in real life Yemeni Arabic to show how meaning is derived. In the process, it will be shown how semantics becomes pragmatics and pragmatics becomes ka:rmatics.

Informativity in Translation

The fact that we not only find that different structural means used to realize information structure across languages, but also within a single language in an interactive fashion, gives rise to several questions concerning the description of information structure and its realization. A complete answer would not necessarily constitute a theory of the relation between information structure and its possible realization. The issue is not just to be able to describe that information structure is realized by tune or word order, for example. If information structure is to be a universal aspect of sentential meaning, then a theory should be able to explain why a language may avail itself of particular structural indications of informativity, and when it would do so - from a cross-linguistic perspective.

Jan Dullaert of Ghent on the Foundations of Propositional Logic

Jan Dullaert (1480-1513) was a direct student of John Mair and a teacher of Gaspar Lax, Juan de Celaya, and Juan Luis Vives. His commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias addresses the foundations of propositional logic, including a detailed analysis of conditionals (following Paul of Venice’s Logica magna) and the semantics of logical connectives (conjunction, disjunction, and implication). Dullaert’s propositional logic is limited to the immediate implications of the semantics of these connectives, i.e., their introduction and elimination rules. In the same context, he discusses several alternative treatments of semantic paradoxes, paying most attention to the approaches derived from Martin Le Maistre (based on the idea that sentential meaning is closed under entailment) and John Mair (based on the idea that self-falsifying sentences are false).

An Error Analysis of Chinese “Bei” (被) Passives from the Perspectives of Animacy and Semantic Feature Constraint

Comparing with Ancient Chinese, passive sentences in Modern Chinese have been increasingly used, and patient subjects in them are not limited to noun phrases with a high animacy and the binding force for the sentential meaning of “suffering” and “misfortune” has largely loosened as well. As the commonest pattern in passive sentences, the same case for “Bei” (被) Passives. It is well known that “Bei” (被) Passives is a sort of difficult syntax pattern in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and errors often occur in the use of “Bei” (被) Passives for a large number of second language learners who take Chinese as their target language. We admit that the usage of “Bei” (被) Passives has a certain connection with the linguistic animacy, while the reason for errors occur in this Chinese sentence “Wo (我) zai (在) dianti (电梯) kou (口) bei (被) ren (人) xiao (笑) le (了) xiao (笑)” is the semantic feature constraint.

Prosodic constraints on pragmatic interpretation: a new chapter in linguistic pragmatics

This paper introduces the importance of prosodic constraints on interpretation in the understanding of the semantic/pragmatic interface and the linguistic marking and lexicalization of pragmatic meanings. It addresses this issue at word and utterance levels, after defining the notions of non-structural prosody and free lexical prosody. At word level, it shows the existence of a prosodic polysemy which lexicalizes into word lexical meanings that include pragmatic orientation, and that prosodic contours/features introduce prosodic comments, typically about the speaker’s position toward what is at stake but also about the hearer’s expected reaction to this position, forcing their description to be polyphonic. Similarly, at utterance level, it is shown that prosodic comments also occur, and moreover that the scope of such comments is often not the “sentential” meaning. The last section is dedicated to the description of the methodology and techniques used in existing programs to allow the automated discrimination of prosodic forms, and a reliable mapping of prosodic forms with interpretations. Because such a process can succeed only by using large oral data bases and considerably improving semantic/pragmatic descriptions, it is finally argued that the study of prosody is to linguistics and pragmatic linguistics what the microscope was for biology.

Inducing Implicit Arguments from Comparable Texts: A Framework and Its Applications

In this article, we investigate aspects of sentential meaning that are not expressed in local predicate–argument structures. In particular, we examine instances of semantic arguments that are only inferable from discourse context. The goal of this work is to automatically acquire and process such instances, which we also refer to as implicit arguments, to improve computational models of language. As contributions towards this goal, we establish an effective framework for the difficult task of inducing implicit arguments and their antecedents in discourse and empirically demonstrate the importance of modeling this phenomenon in discourse-level tasks. Our framework builds upon a novel projection approach that allows for the accurate detection of implicit arguments by aligning and comparing predicate–argument structures across pairs of comparable texts. As part of this framework, we develop a graph-based model for predicate alignment that significantly outperforms previous approaches. Based on such alignments, we show that implicit argument instances can be automatically induced and applied to improve a current model of linking implicit arguments in discourse. We further validate that decisions on argument realization, although being a subtle phenomenon most of the time, can considerably affect the perceived coherence of a text. Our experiments reveal that previous models of coherence are not able to predict this impact. Consequently, we develop a novel coherence model, which learns to accurately predict argument realization based on automatically aligned pairs of implicit and explicit arguments.