http://hdl.handle.net/11320/7500 2026-06-01T07:29:06Z 2026-06-01T07:29:06Z Olajimbiti, Ezekiel Opeyemi http://hdl.handle.net/11320/7505 2019-01-23T12:10:58Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Tytuł: Discourse Pattern, Contexts and Pragmatic Strategies of Selected Fraud Spam Autorzy: Olajimbiti, Ezekiel Opeyemi Abstrakt: The thrust of this paper is the pragmatic investigation of fraud spam, the unwanted emails containing the strategic use of language with the intention to swindle money from the recipients. Sixty (60) English medium email samples were collected from the author of the present paper’s email spam between July 2017 and February 2018 in Nigeria. These were analysed using Halliday and Hasan’s Generic Structure Potential and an aspect of Fetzer’s cognitive context model. The study identified six discourse patterns: salutation, discourse initiation, enticing information, mild conscription into business, request and subscription; orienting to contexts of business and religion; manifesting pragmatic strategies of adversatives, evocation of business idea, evocation of religious affinity and evocation of messianic figure. The study, therefore, concludes that cyber-fraudsters deploy similarly familiar patterns and contexts evincing strategic persuasive language to defraud their prospective victims. Significantly, the study complements existing literature on fraud discourse in linguistic scholarship.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Karimov, Raoul http://hdl.handle.net/11320/7504 2019-01-23T11:33:37Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Tytuł: Combined Machine-Learning Approach to PoS-Tagging of Middle English Corpora Autorzy: Karimov, Raoul Abstrakt: This paper considers the problem of part-of-speech tagging in Middle English corpora (as well as historical corpora in general). Whereas PoS-tagging in general is now considered a solved problem for Modern English and is mainly achieved via hidden Markov models (HMM) and matrix-based word-to-vector conversions with every word in the dictionary being embedded into a single dimension, this approach relies on recurrent syntactic structures and context-free generative grammars and is therefore not applicable to older iterations of the English language due to irregular word order. As such, we believe that Middle English could be better handled by a morphographemic encoding and instance-based machine learning algorithms like SVM, random forests, kNN, etc. Using a moving-average method to generate multidimensional vectors giving a reliable numeric representation of character composition and sequences, we have achieved a precision and recall of 87.5% in classifying Middle English words by their part of speech while using a simplistic combined voting-based binary classifier. This result could be deemed satisfactory and encourages further research in the area.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Dziedziul, Paweł http://hdl.handle.net/11320/7503 2019-01-23T11:13:56Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Tytuł: Contronymy and Semantic Primes Autorzy: Dziedziul, Paweł Abstrakt: Contronymy, that is sense opposition invoked by one word, can pose a serious conundrum from a theoretical standpoint. Nonetheless, the prime concern of this paper is to introduce the phenomenon into a broader discussion within theoretical linguistics. To be more specific, the question at hand is: what kind of comprehensive and coherent theoretical construct can be adequate for semantic representation of contronymy? It will be demonstrated that the particular sense opposition can be classified as being linked with direct negation. A theoretical vantage point will be presented that addresses the cause of opposition via the means of the natural semantic metalanguage theory. This approach may shed some light on how to deal with the problem from a cognitive perspective. The underlying methodological assumptions of the presented framework, based on the idea of semantic primes, prove to be a coherent tool for encapsulating radical sense opposition manifested by contronyms. As an addendum to this prolegomena there will also be presented a brief discussion of some of the implications of contronymy for fields such as the theory of the human mind, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine translations and big data structures.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Ananda, M.G. Lalith http://hdl.handle.net/11320/7502 2019-01-23T10:31:01Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Tytuł: Information Structure Projects in Syntax: Evidence from Focus and Modality in Sinhala Autorzy: Ananda, M.G. Lalith Abstrakt: The major claim of this paper is that information structure related particles of Sinhala are distinct functional heads and they project in syntax. This is in line with the cartographic approach to syntax which claims that discourse related features are visible for computation (Rizzi 1997, 2004), a claim also supported by Miyagawa, (2010), and Aboh (2010), among others. The present paper seeks to validate the above claim with evidence from Sinhala, motivating the argument that discourse related features lexicalized in Sinhala drive the derivation, and these features are comparable to formal features in establishing an Agree relation.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z