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Topic: Mass lexical comparison

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	Mass lexical comparison - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Mass lexical comparison or mass comparison is a highly controversial method developed by the well-known linguist Joseph Greenberg to find genetic relationships among languages in the remote past, beyond the limits of the traditional comparative method, or in situations where there are too many languages to practically apply the latter without many generations of work.
		Since the development of comparative linguistics in the 19th century, a linguist who claims that two languages are related, in the absence of historical evidence, is expected to back up that claim by presenting general rules that describe the differences between their lexicons, morphologies, and grammars.
		The statistical difficulties inherent in Greenberg's method of mass lexical comparison are compounded by the fact that many historical linguists are unfamiliar with statistical analysis, and therefore are at a disadvantage when it comes to evaluating or criticizing its conclusions.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Mass_lexical_comparison (1536 words)

	Merritt Ruhlen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The majority of criticisms of Ruhlen center around his use of mass comparison, which instead of using common historical linguistic methods of comparison, involves comparing the lexicons of however many languages one is investigating and examining them for words in two or more languages which appear similar phonologically and have a similar meaning.
		Historical linguists argue that most results turned up with mass comparison could easily be cases of simple coincidence.
		Ruhlen and his followers reply that the sheer volume of the correspondences which their mass comparisons have turned up is far too large to possibly be due to chance.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Merritt_Ruhlen (508 words)

	Words in context: ERPs and the lexical/postlexical distinction
		Classic models of language comprehension posit a distinction between lexical processing, thought to be early, fast-acting, and automatic, and post-lexical processing, thought to be slower, more controlled, and to require the output of the lexical processing system for its operation.
		However, when lexical association and contextual congruity conflict in their utility for the construction of the message-level representation, contextual congruity overrides the effect of lexical association.
		The fact that activity in the same brain areas is modulated by lexical and post-lexical variables is not consistent with models that posit discrete mechanisms for lexical and post-lexical priming effects.
	cogsci.ucsd.edu /~coulson/jpr.htm (6168 words)

	[No title]
		The subjects received one form as a lexical decision test followed 48 hours later with a naming task, and followed 48 hours later with another naming task where all the original nonwords were converted back to the root words that they were derived from.
		If we assume that frequency effects are a active in the retrieval from lexical memory, we can explain the frequency by repetition effect as an interaction at the same locus in the processing scheme.
		His unusual lexical decision priming can be thought of as a weakening or disconnection of the top-down pathway.
	www.mit.edu /afs/sipb.mit.edu/user/mycroftt/final2.mss (2624 words)

	Introduction (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Deciding whether the headword in a phrase should be lexicalized as a mass noun is not as straightforward as it might seem.
		For example, ``anthrax'' will be a mass noun when referring to the bacteria, but it will be a count noun when referring to the resulting skin lesions (e.g., ``anthraces'').
		This shows that `luggage' is correctly given as a mass noun, and `table' is correctly pluralized for the suggestions; however, `desk' is incorrectly left singular.
	www.cs.nmsu.edu /~tomohara/mass-count-inference/node1.html (607 words)

	HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS FACTS AND INFORMATION (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The idea is that this linguistic "noise" may be reduced by comparing large amounts of words, which is exactly the point of mass lexical comparison.
		However, by ignoring known historical changes in the languages, mass lexical comparison incorporates known randomness, and therefore appears to be willfully inaccurate.
		Its proponents, unlike Greenberg, use the traditional comparative_method; however, their comparisons are often accused of being far-fetched or involving too many semantic shifts, while some also accuse them of simply grouping together the language families most familiar to them and neglecting to compare each of them to language families further afield.
	www.whereintheworldisbush.com /historical_linguistics (1148 words)

	Business Encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		This method was enthusiastically embraced by some historical linguists (and many geneticists), but was rejected by most historical linguists.
		See mass lexical comparison for a fuller discussion.
		For criticisms and defenses of specific theories, see the relevant articles (linguistic universals, implicational universal, mass lexical comparison, Niger-Congo languages, Nilo-Saharan languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, Amerind languages, Eurasiatic languages, Indo-Pacific languages.)
	www.bizencyclopedia.com /index.php?title=Joseph_Greenberg (625 words)

	Untitled
		It is the lexicalization of such axiality that can align adjectives with expressions of spatial relation.
		Though the ontological status of these two constituents/functors is far from clear at present, their function is obvious: the conceptual integrator is assumed to cover one important prerequisite for opposites, viz.
		the fact that there must be a basis of comparison, the conceptual differentiator states the common basis against which the opposition as such is established.
	www.univie.ac.at /Anglistik/pub/arthur92/arthur.htm (2458 words)

	On transitivity alternation in Japanese and English:
		Under an analysis of lexical semantics, on the other hand, the transitivity alternation is viewed as a non-lexical process.
		Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995) first postulate two lexical representations for transitivity alternating verbs, that is lexical semantic and lexical syntactic (or argument structure) representations.
		That is, the transitivizing suffix -e in Jacobsen’s Class I suggests that its verb stem involves a change caused by a volitional agent, whereas the intransitive suffix -e in Jacobsen’s Class II denote a self-induced change associated with the meaning of its verb stem (Jacobsen 1992, Kageyama 1996, Kanaya 2000).
	web.aall.ufl.edu /SJS/Matsuzaki.html (4511 words)

	Thesis
		This polarization is particularly strong between those who accept and reject the technique of mass lexical comparison, which groups languages into families by collecting lists of words for the same concept, and noting exceptional similarities.
		Opponents (traditional comparativists) claim that the kind of evidence mass lexicalists gather is in principle incapable of revealing connections between languages, and may even look with disfavor on the whole idea of comparing lists of words.
		But when a rigorous statistical methodology is introduced, the most effective and reliable type of evidence turns out to be something that looks a lot like mass lexical comparison: collecting lists of words and comparing at a fairly superficial level those that name the same concept.
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~bkessler/thesis (659 words)

	A Comparative Lexical Study of Qur'ānic Arabic (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The work is based on a quantitative analysis of a substantial corpus of the Arabic lexicon with a view to investigating lexical relationships within a number of Semitic languages.
		Qur'ānic Arabic is the source of a lexical mass comparison exercise involving Akkadian, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Phoenician, Epigraphic South Arabian and Ge‘ez.
		Moreover, the lexical links identified in this study are in themselves linguistic indicators of the various degrees of cultural proximity characterising the various Semitic languages.
	www.brill.nl /product.asp?ID=9307 (200 words)

	Compares (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		These comparisons are frequently found in advertising; for example, in assertions such as "Our burgers have more flavor!" (More flavor than ''what''?), "Our picture tube is sharper!" (Sharper than ''what''?), "50% more!" (50% more than ''what'', exactly?), etc. Similar problems attend slogans such as "100% pure" (pure ''what'', again?).
		The comparative method is the "gold standard" by which mainstream linguists judge whether two languages are related; relation is deemed certain only if a reconstruction of the common ancestor (or at least a partial reconstruction) is feasible.
		Other approaches to the problem that have been proposed, such as Joseph Greenberg's "mass lexical comparison" method, are still considered too unreliable by most linguists.
	www.wwwtln.com /finance/44/compares.html (1705 words)

	Near-Synonymy and the Structure of Lexical Knowledge - Hirst (ResearchIndex)
		Applications of Lexical Cohesion in the Topic Detection and..
		2 and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organizati..
		Lexical Chains as Representations of Context for the..
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /hirst95nearsynonymy.html (603 words)

	Otter 3.0 Manual
		Lrpo comparison is used when orienting equality literals, deciding whether an equality should be a demodulator or an lrpo-dependent demodulator, and deciding whether to apply an lrpo-dependent demodula- tor.
		The lexical comparison is the same as in lex-dependent demodulation; in particular, the flag lex_order_vars (Secs.
		The command special_unary([g(x)]) causes g to be ignored during term comparisons, and the expression would be demodulated to a.
	www.cs.uu.nl /docs/vakken/ar/archief/manual30.html (17188 words)

	Languge death
		Lexical borrowings are the main evidence for interference between Akkadian and Sumerian.
		First, the unequal evidence of lexical interference would suggest that most of it took place in a situation in which the social prestige of Akkadian was much higher than that of Sumerian.
		Comparison with similar changes in written norms suggests that we have to allow for the contingency that much was at stake.
	www-personal.umich.edu /~piotrm/DIGLOS~1.htm (9665 words)

	[No title]
		Lexical semantic information is determined in part by the words themselves and in part by the context in which they appear.
		Such lexical semantic information includes verbal aspect, nominal classification (e.g., count-mass, locative and frequency), modifier classification (e.g., positive-negative, intersective-nonintersective, and eventive-propositional) and relations between participants and events (e.g., sentience and volition).
		Although we are aware of no systems that use hand tagged corpora in service of acquiring lexical semantics, it seems likely that such corpora would aid the identification of non-semantic cues for lexical semantic information.
	www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de /~light/tueb_html/semtag_ws_call.html (587 words)

	UNIVERSITY OF MALTA (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		This work is based on a quantitative analysis of a substantial corpus of the Arabic lexicon with a view to investigating lexical relationships within nine Semitic languages.
		Chapter Three presents the lexical data, with Qur'anic Arabic at the basis of a lexical mass comparison exercise involving Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Ge'ez and Epigraphic South Arabian.
		However, the lexical links identified in this study are in themselves linguistic indicators of the various degrees of cultural proximity characterizing the Semitic languages.
	www.um.edu.mt /pub/zammitr.html (220 words)

	Past Linguistic Activities from 2003
		It argues for (a) an Anatolian lexical borrowing in Greek, attested as an isolated gloss in the lexicographer Hesychius, and (b) a notional and semantic correspondence between two motifs found in Hittite and Homeric texts respectively.
		Comparison of a peculiar phenomenon found in several Hittite myths about vanishing gods - mist enveloping the house (kammaras) - with the equally peculiar phenomenon of 'akhlus' attested in Greek epic, points to a possible common 'motifeme' shared between the two traditions.
		Similarly, roots in both AEI and YNG are radically underspecified with respect to certain lexical classifications in Indo-European, such as the Italian distinction between unaccusative and transitive/unergative codings of event structure (Burzio 1981).
	www.bu.edu /linguistics/UG/past-events03lx.html (7786 words)

	Pedantry - everything that bored you to death in high school
		They require a metalworking industry, mass produced nails and access to lumber, each of which involves a complicated cultural framework of divided labour, market relations, transportation networks and the like.
		In the era before mass media and rapid transportation, they would in fact have constituted a relatively just and economically efficient basis for language policy.
		However, the instrumental value of mass languages today is so great that to imagine that any sort of minimalist language policy can be economically efficient may be an unreasonable assumption.
	pedantry.blogspot.com /2003_08_17_pedantry_archive.html (17709 words)

	OpenCyc vs. ThoughtTreasure: A comparison
		This is a mostly numeric comparison of OpenCyc and ThoughtTreasure.
		lexical entries is the number of posForms assertions that map word to part of speech in OpenCyc and the number of English and French lexical entries (words and phrases) in ThoughtTreasure.
		lexical entry to concept links is the number of denotation assertions that map word, part of speech, and sense number to concept in OpenCyc and the number of links between lexical entries and objects in ThoughtTreasure.
	www.signiform.com /tt/htm/opencyctt.htm (414 words)

	Ethnologue: Bibliography of Ethnologue Data Sources
		On the comparison and classification of Banda dialects.
		In H. Shorto, ed., Linguistic comparison in South East Asia and the Pacific.
		Lexical transfer from Marshallese to Mokilese: A study in Intra-Micronesian borrowing.
	www.ethnologue.com /ethno_docs/bibliography.asp (7065 words)

	[No title]
		This chapter considers the input half of this physical level of human-computer interaction, the final means by which the user communicates information to the computer.
		It is also called the Lexical level of the design of an interactive system, in contrast to the successively higher Syntactic, Semantic, and Conceptual levels[9].
		The gloves report the configuration of the fingers of the user's hand, Note the 3-D magnetic sensor incorporated into the wristband of the glove; it reports the position and angle of the hand itself.
	www.cs.tufts.edu /~jacob/papers/crc.html (8687 words)

	Untitled Document (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Only in lexical comparisons would some marked changes be required (I will come to this subject next) and in interpretations of Montesinos’s manner of writing history.
		The results of this lexical comparison are as follows: the dynasty of Tampu-Tocco has a significantly higher percentage of words (45%) which indicate a ‘blending’ (loanwords from one language to the other) of Quechua and Aymara.
		My lexical comparison of the names in Montesinos’s king list showed that names of rulers in the dynasty of Tampu Tocco contain a significantly higher percentage of words reflecting a blending of Quechua and Aymara, more than do the names of their predecessors.
	www.traditionalhighcultures.com /HiltunenPaper.htm (14468 words)

	Ethnologue: Bibliography of Ethnologue Data Sources
		Jungraithmayr, H. A lexical comparison of Darfur and Wadai Daju.
		A lexical aspect of Somali and East Cushitic languages.
		A comparison of the pidgins of Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
	www.ethnologue.com /14/ethno_docs/bibliography.asp (7160 words)

	Barry: Choosing Qualitative Data Analysis Software
		The feature by feature comparison of the software packages provided by Weitzman and Miles are helpful in gaining a view of the strengths and weaknesses of the two packages.
		However, I found that at the end of reading I was still unsure of which to recommend to others and on what criteria.
		Conversely, those who are easy with a mass of data and comfortable with uncertainty may prefer the variety of options in Atlas/ti.
	www.socresonline.org.uk /3/3/4.html (6747 words)

	TRANS Nr. 13: Agata Skowron Nalborczyk: The Arabophones in German-speaking Communities between Diglossia and ...
		Let us turn our attention to the lexical influence that diglossia from one side and bilingualism from another exerts on the languages the Arabophones use.
		Borrowing involves the transfer of lexical items from one language to another,(9) and the borrowed items can be either unchanged or inflected like words of the same grammatical category in the borrowing language.
		These lexical borrowings are from such domains as the household and the emotions.
	www.inst.at /trans/13Nr/skowron13.htm (3221 words)

	Language classification
		(1) The comparative method (using inter-language comparisons to establish systematic correspondences) and the method of mass comparison are generally treated as two differing ways of working out genetic relationships between languages.
		Data for both comparative method and mass comparison consists of forms which combine sound/meaning resemblances (particularly lexical items, but also grammatical morphemes).
		The two pursuits should not be in conflict inasmuch as their goals are different--mass comparison seeks to discover linguistic relationships which are not immediately obvious, the comparative method confirms those relationships and makes their nature more precise.
	www.humnet.ucla.edu /humnet/linguistics/people/schuh/Lx110/Discussion/01_disc.html (1431 words)

	The Austroasiatics in Ancient South China (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The purpose of this paper is to contribute some lexical evidence towards the solution of this problem.
		In particular, we will try to show that the Austroasiatics inhabited the shores of the middle Yangtze and parts of the southeast coast during the first half of the first millennium B.C., and that the Chinese borrowed the name of the Yangtze from them.
		Bodman, A linguistic study of the Shih-ming (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p.
	www.people.cornell.edu /pages/tm17/paper459.htm (6974 words)

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