<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Previous studies based on English, Russian and Ch inese corpora show that the average word length in texts grows steadily across centuries. These findings are in accordance with our results: the average word length in Arabic texts also grows during the analysed time span (8th century to the first half of the 20th century). Our paper shows the detailed statistics of the word length distribution century by century. The dynamics of the average word length correlates with the dynamics of the average word distribution entropy, which encourages an explanation of the phenomenon based on the Shannonian theory of communication.</abstract>

Average Word Length from the Diachronic Perspective: The Case of Arabic

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">German–Austrian psychology is a direct source of the European formalism movement both in the German context (Germany, Austria) as well as in Russia. This interest of the formalists in the corporeal component of linguistic and literary production has resulted in a particular research stream, which could be defined as a ‘linguo-somatic orientation’. In particular, this is the case of Alois Riegl’s [1] perceptive ‘tactile–optical’ method; Adolf von Hildebrand’s [2] architectonic conception; Konrad Fiedler’s [3] ‘sensorial aesthetics’; W. Wölfflin’s [4] ‘basic concepts’ of the art history, W. Worringer’s [5] psychological arts typology as well as Oskar Walzel’s sound-corporeal poetics elaborated during 1920 [6]. Within Russian formalism, psychological notions (such as ‘representation’, ‘sensation’, ‘apperception’, ‘series’, ‘clear and dark zones of consciousness’, ‘verbal gestures’ and ‘sound gestures’) are fundamental in nearly all the formalist conceptions (Viktor Šklovskij, Evgenij Polivanov, Lev Jakubinskij, Osip Brik, Boris Eixenbaum and Jurij Tynianov). This psychological background constitutes a rather heterogeneous constellation composed of psychological aesthetics and psychological linguistics of the second half of the 19th century. Independently of its intrinsic theoretical values, the formalist way of thinking about language and literature is based on the implicit dominance of psychology, which takes its sense only with respect to the German cognitive tradition, appropriated by the <italic>Geisteswissenschaften</italic> of this time. In this respect, European formalism participates in the large movement of psychologisation of the humanities. To this extent, the case of Russian formalism is really representative: it invites the rethinking of the genealogy of European structuralism in general. This accumulation of conceptual tools borrowed from the German psychological tradition also reveals a cognitive charge of the formalist theories. The latter constitute a conceptual link between the properly psychological past of the European <italic>Geisteswissenschaften</italic> and the ‘cognitive’ future of the actual research programmes. Beyond the borrowing of conceptual tools from the psychological trend, the formal method has found in psychology its inspiration for producing new models of analysis. This intrinsically cognitivist dimension of the formalist programme explains its late success during the 1950s–1960s, the period often and abusively called the period of the cognitivist revolution. In reality, it deals with the re-emergence of the research programme of the cognitivist sciences, rather exhaustively formulated by the German psychological tradition..</abstract>

The formal method in Germany and Russia: the beginnings of European psycholinguistics

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Metaphors constitute a relevant method for both building and making sense of theories. Semiotics is not exempt from their influence, and an important range of semiotic theories depends on metaphors to be meaningful. In this paper, we wish to examine the place of theory-constitutive metaphors considering the interaction view and the extent to which some areas of semiotics, particularly, the semiotics of culture and biosemiotics, are enriched by having metaphors dominate the way we think about them. The intention of the paper is not to document the different metaphors that have built semiotic theory, but rather to observe through a number of examples that semiotic research contains theory-building metaphors and that these are productive means of developing semiotic thinking further, with the caveat that theory change can be unexpected based on how we build metaphors for our theories.</abstract>

Productive perils: on metaphor as a theory-building device

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this paper, we will motivate the application of specific rules of inference from the propositional calculus to natural language sentences. Specifically, we will analyse De Morgan’s laws, which pertain to the interaction of two central topics in syntactic research: negation and coordination. We will argue that the applicability of De Morgan’s laws to natural language structures can be derived from independently motivated operations of grammar and principles restricting the application of these operations. This has direct empirical consequences for the hypothesised relations between natural language and logic.</abstract>

De Morgan’s laws and NEG-raising: a syntactic view

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this study, we aim to introduce the analytical method bag-of-words, which is mainly used as a tool for the analysis (document classification, authorship attribution and so on; e.g. [1, 2]) of natural languages. Quantitative linguistic methods similar to bag-of-words (e.g. Damerau–Levenshtein distance in the paper by Serva and Petroni [3]) have been used for the mapping of language evolution within the field of glottochronology. We attempt to apply this method in the field of biological taxonomy – on the Brassicaceae (Cruciferae) family. The subjects of our interest are well-known cultivated crops, which at first sight are morphologically very different and culturally perceived as objects of different interests (e.g. oil from oilseed rape, turnip as animal feed and cabbage as a side dish). Despite the phenotypic divergence of these crops, they are very closely related, which is not morphologically obvious at first sight. For this reason, we think that Brassicaceae crops are appropriate illustrative examples for introducing the method. For the analysis, we use genetic markers (internal transcribed spacer [ITS] and maturase K [matK]). Until now, the bag-of-words model has not been used for biological taxonomisation purposes; therefore, the results of the bagof-words analysis are compared with the existing very well-developed Brassica taxonomy. Our goal is to present a method that is suitable for language development reconstruction as well as possibly being usable for biological taxonomy purposes.</abstract>

The Department of General Linguistics and Theory of Communication

Genetic analysis of cabbages and related cultivated plants using the bag-of-words model

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Volume 6 (2023): Issue 3 (December 2023)

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Linguistic Frontiers

 Linguistic Frontiers is a peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on research and collaboration in linguistics, life science, mathematics, social science and the humanities, applying formal and experimental approaches from linguistic interdisciplines like quantitative linguistics, psycholinguistics, biosemiotics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language processing and linguistic field research. The guiding ambition of Linguistic Frontiers is to fruitfully transfer and apply methods and topics between these fields of linguistic research. Linguistic Frontiers also publishes reviews of scientific publications, reports on conferences and research programs. We welcome host editors for special theme issues as well.　Subject areas of study include, but are not limited to:  general linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics semiotics philosophy of language biosemiotics, biolinguistics, DNA linguistics cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics applied linguistics glottochronology, stylometry (critical) discourse analysis Linguistic Frontiers is published in English, but occasionally we accept special issues in other world languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German). Authors are requested to submit their papers in doc. format. We offer a double blinded review process with an average length of 3 months. Linguistic Frontiers is a continuation of the journal Czech and Slovak Linguistic Revue (CSLR) http://cslr.upol.cz/archive/, published in print and electronically at Palacký University since 2011. After 2018, CSLR with an extended international editorial board merged into Linguistic Frontiers and has been published by De Gruyter Open (now Sciendo) in electronic form only. Since 2021 we publish three issues per year (June, September, December).　  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.   Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 