In this paper I present the prepositional system of Persian. I show that Persian prepositions can be divided into three classes (Class 1, Class 2a and Class 2b) which exhibit distinct syntactic behavior. Then I examine the question of the categorial status of Class 2 prepositions and demonstrate that they are not to be regarded as nouns. Finally I present the extended PP projection of Persian s...

In order to facilitate sentiment analysis of Persian text, we’ve designed and implemented an algorithm which aims to detect words with negative polarity. Currently most sentiment analysis algorithms depend mainly on polarity datasets. However, since negative prefixes in Persian are only attached to a semantically positive base (shaghagi, 2002), we have incorporated a negative prefix detection t...

This paper introduces PersPred, the first manually elaborated syntactic and semantic database for Persian Complex Predicates (CPs). Beside their theoretical interest, Persian CPs constitute an important challenge in Persian lexicography and for NLP. The first delivery, PersPred 11, contains 700 CPs, for which 22 fields of lexical, syntactic and semantic information are encoded. The semantic cla...

This paper describes a pilot study in lexical encoding of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in 4 Latin American dialects of Spanish: Costa Rican, Colombian, Mexican and Peruvian. We describe the variability of MWE usage across dialects. We adapt an existing data model to a dialect-aware encoding, so as to represent dialect-related specificities, while avoiding redundancy of the data common for all ...

The sociolinguistic situation in Arabic countries is characterized by diglossia (Ferguson, 1959) : whereas one variant Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is highly codified and mainly used for written communication, other variants coexist in regular everyday’s situations (dialects). Similarly, while a number of resources and tools exist for MSA (lexica, annotated corpora, taggers, parsers . . . ), ve...

Because of the scarcity of observational data, existing estimates of the heat and water budgets of the Persian Gulf are rather uncertain. This uncertainty leaves open the fundamental question ofwhether this water body is a net heat source or a net heat sink to the atmosphere. Previous regional modeling studies either used specified surface fluxes to simulate the hydrodynamics of the Gulf or pre...

BACKGROUND During the 1990-1991 Gulf War, approximately 700,000 U.S. troops were deployed to the Persian Gulf theater of operations. Of that number, approximately 100,000 have presented medical complaints through various registry and examination programs. OBJECTIVES Widespread symptomatic illness without defining physical features has been reported among veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. We asce...

Dialectal variations provide vital cues to both synchronic and diachronic changes in sounds of a language. There has been no comparative phonological study of the dialects of Hindi in the last several decades. In this paper, we present a phonological description of seven of the major dialects of Hindi, namely, Awadhi, Bagheli, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, Haryanvi, Kanauji and Khari Boli, based on the ob...

This paper examines the manifestation of downstep and intonation in the Tokyo and Kochi dialects of Japanese by using three types of syntactically balanced material adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentence modifiers. The main conclusion is that Kochi speakers produce a smaller Major Phrase consisting of fewer lexical accents than in the Tokyo dialect, the Major Phrase being defined as...

The present article presents a study of the raising of overlong mid vowels in Estonian dialects. Long mid vowels of South Estonian dialects (Mulgi, Tartu and Võru) have split into full-long mid vowels (Q2) and into overlong raised mid vowels (Q3). Raising of mid vowels also characterises West Estonian dialects. The formant values of raised mid vowels of Võru and Mulgi show that they are much hi...