• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.39
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• pp.329-354
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• 2015

The major goals of this paper are to identify the degree into which the meanings of 'see' verb can be extended, focusing on the extended meanings shown in the expressions that denote our instinctive actions for survival, such as eating or drinking, etc., and to clarify the doubt on whether any syntactic pattern can be associated with the meaning in the process of meaning extension of 'see' verb. For doing this task, this paper picked out 2,000 examples randomly from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), in which the verb 'see' is used. This paper classified the sentences into thirteen different sentence types, according to the syntactic patterns. This research showed that these thirteen syntactic types lead us to figure out the process of the meaning extension of the verb 'see'. With this result, this paper made an attempt to provide the four steps toward the meaning extension of verb 'see'. The verb 'see' in the first step denotes the meaning of purely seeing the visualized objects. This verb in the second step expresses the shifted function, under which the agent in the subject position takes the seeing action as a secondary task in order to carry out other main task. The verb in the third step denotes the extended meanings irrelevant to the seeing action, because the sentences on this step do not contain any visualized objects. In the last step this verb functions as conventional implicature whose meaning does not contribute to the whole meaning of a sentence. In addition, this paper identified that the syntactic properties are deeply associated with the process of meaning extension of the verb 'see', and tried to formalize this relationship between the syntax and semantics within the framework of Construction Grammar based on A. Goldberg.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.99-108
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• 2013

Previous laboratory studies have shown that prosodic structures are encoded in the modulations of phonetic patterns of speech including suprasegmental as well as segmental features. In particular, effects of prosodic context on duration and intensity of syllables and words have been widely reported. Drawing on prosodically annotated large-scale speech data from the Buckeye corpus of conversational speech of American English, the current study attempted to examine whether and how prosodic prominence and phrase boundary of everyday conversational speech, as determined by a large group of ordinary listeners, are related to the phonetic realization of duration and intensity. The results showed that the patterns of word durations and intensities are influenced by prosodic structure. Closer examinations revealed, however, that the effects of prosodic prominence are not the same as those of prosodic phrase boundary. With regard to intensity measures, the results revealed the systematic changes in the patterns of overall RMS intensity near prosodic phrase boundary but the prominence effects are restricted to the nucleus. In terms of duration measures, both prosodic prominence and phrase boundary are the most closely related to the lengthening of the nucleus. Yet, prosodic prominence is more closely related to the lengthening of the onset while phrase boundary lengthens the coda duration more. The findings from the current study suggest that the phonetic realizations of prosodic prominence are different from those of prosodic phrase boundary, and speakers signal different prosodic structures through deliberate modulations of the internal phonetic structure of words and listeners attend to such phonetic variations.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.163-170
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• 2017

Despite the rise of studies in spoken to sign language translation, low-resource problems of sign language corpus have been rarely addressed. As a first step towards translating from spoken to sign language, we addressed the problems arising from resource scarcity when translating spoken language to manual signals translation using statistical machine translation techniques. More specifically, we proposed three preprocessing methods: 1) paraphrase generation, which increases the size of the corpora, 2) lemmatization, which increases the frequency of each word in the corpora and the translatability of new input words in spoken language, and 3) elimination of function words that are not glossed into manual signals, which match the corresponding constituents of the bilingual sentence pairs. In our experiments, we used different types of English-American sign language parallel corpora. The experimental results showed that the system with each method and the combination of the methods improved the quality of manual signals translation, regardless of the type of the corpora.