CLCS

For over 400 years, dramatists, novelists, and other writers seeking to depict Irish characters have relied in part on words and phrases taken to be indexical of Irishness when representing the conversational functions now associated with the term 'discourse marker'. In keeping with the general trend in the lexical development of Irish English, many of the terms which are commonly cited are etymologically derived from Irish and carry over similar discourse functions. These terms include introductory particles as in

Dialects arise not because of the mere fact of individuell Variation but because two or more groups of individuals have become sufficiently disconnected to drift apart, or independently, instead of together. Sapir (1921: 150) The fact that diversity is not automatically connected with Isolation suggests that it may also be connected with the normal processes of face-to-face communication. Labov (1972: 324) Prologue From 1995 until 1998, the European Science Foundation funded an international research network of sociodialectologists working on aspects of "The Convergence and Divergence of Dialects in a Changing Europe." The Network, which was founded and chaired by Peter Auer (Universities of Hamburg and, subsequently, Freiburg) and Frans Hinskens (Universities of Nijmegen and, subsequently, Leipzig), and in which eleven European countries were officially represented, organized three workshops (in Nijmegen, Gent, and Heidelberg), an open Conference in Reading, and a summer school for Ph.D. students in Malaga. There is also a series of publications relating to the theme of the Network, some of which have appeared already (Auer et al. 1996; Auer 1998b), while others are still in preparation. Further Information about the activities of the Network, the electronic first versions of most of the papers presented at the Workshops, the abstracts for the open Conference, and a number of reports can be traced through the ESF homepage: <http://www.esf.org).

This is a review of Culinary Linguistics, edited by Cornelia Gerhardt, Maximiliane Frobenius, and Susanne Ley (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2013). The review considers the contents of the volume and suggests that it offers many thought-provoking directions for further research.

A volume titled The Essential Writings of Bernard Spolsky would fill a great need. The editors, however, would need to be vigilant. Spolsky's essential contributions cover so many fields, and have had such an impact for researchers and practitioners in so many disciplines and parts of the world, that conveying both the diversity and the coherence of his work would be a challenge, albeit an enjoyable one. Spolsky's work in educational linguistics and literacy, language testing, language policy and management, and other aspects of language in society enriched these fields at crucial times in their development. In the breakthrough volume Educational Linguistics, for example, Spolsky (1978) drew together principles in linguistics, language teaching, and society to articulate the urgency of overcoming 'the language barrier to education' (p. 6) which arises in many societies because 'it is the exception rather than the rule that a child comes to school speaking the language or variety that the educational system uses or aims at' (p. 14). Decades later, Spolsky was engaged in fresh debates in this field, exploring the possibility of a 'critical educational linguistics' in the newly-launched Educational Linguistics journal. In a characteristically thoughtful and erudite paper, Spolsky (2022a: 17) maintained his concern with real-world problems, expressing his alarm at current 'pressures for monolingualism'. Among these he included 'the return to the imperial policy in Russia' , 'the anti-bilingual education movement in the USA' , and 'the change of Arabic from official to special in Israel'. As if this work were not enough, Spolsky had early established a further stream of research in Jewish languages. This work included historical and ethnographic approaches, and culminated in Spolsky's The Languages of the Jews (2014). His unique ability to bring history, the sociology of language, and an understanding of community practice together in a single treatment made for a comprehensive and masterful volume. Spolsky further demonstrated his extensive knowledge, collegiality, and discerning judgment as a frequent and enthusiastic reviewer of books across a wide range of subjects.

I would like to start this reflection by remembering a talk which took place in the Geography Department in Trinity College in the early 1980s. The speaker was a visiting professor from the University of Udine in the northeast of Italy. He was working on the Atlas Linguarum Europae project, which was mapping the use of language throughout Europe, and is still in progress. As the professor tried to explain the difficulties of mapping language use in the Udine region, a member of the audience asked, quite reasonably, if this wasn't simply a matter of using questionnaires and available census data to find out who speaks what in Udine and its environs. 'No', replied the Professor; it was not that simple. Before the second world war, the Udine region had contained a large Slovenian-speaking population, which was now much reduced. In nearby Trieste, many other languages, including Yiddish, had also been spoken. Over the border in Yugoslavia, conversely, there had been a

The judgements made are based on several localization projects spanning almost a decade's work.
This document is a guide that describes the way we have dealt with or worked around the following: The definite article, capitalization, plurals and numbers, abbreviations, the amparsan, shortcuts, apostrophes, questions, dialects and variant forms, translation of politeness, corporate and metaphorical uses of the pronoun "we", placenames, product names and proper nouns, verbal nouns and gerunds, and Gramadach na Gaeilge: An Caighdeán Oifigiúil (Irish Grammar: the Official Standard).
We have also appended this style guide with a short glossary of terms that frequently require disambiguation.

The BERT family of neural language models have become highly popular due to their ability to provide sequences of text with rich context-sensitive token encodings which are able to generalise well to many NLP tasks. We introduce gaBERT, a monolingual BERT model for the Irish language. We compare our gaBERT model to multilingual BERT and the monolingual Irish WikiBERT, and we show that gaBERT provides better representations for a downstream parsing task. We also show how different filtering criteria, vocabulary size and the choice of subword tokenisation model affect downstream performance. We compare the results of fine-tuning a gaBERT model with an mBERT model for the task of identifying verbal multiword expressions, and show that the fine-tuned gaBERT model also performs better at this task. We release gaBERT and related code to the community.

Leagtar amach sa pháipéar seo na céimeanna a leanadh le Corpas Foclóireachta na Gaeilge 2020 (CFG2020), corpas aonteangach 77.3 milliún focal, a thiomsú. Mínítear comhthéacs an tionscadail agus na riachtanais a spreag na cinntí a tógadh lena linn. Déantar cur síos ansin ar chéim an tiomsaithe agus ar na céimeanna próiseála. Tugtar spléachadh ar inneachar an chorpais, ar an acmhainn a cruthaíodh lena chuardach, agus ar an gcineál anailíse agus taighde a cumasaíodh leis seo. Tiomsaíodh CFG2020 ar an tuiscint gur réamhchéim é ar thionscadal níos leithne corpais, is ar an gcúis sin a dhéantar moltaí i dtaca lena fheabhsú agus lena mhéadú.

In the development of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) modules there is a growing emphasis on the use of evolving technological developments which include text-to-speech technology (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). These technologies allow for greater spoken interaction between the learner and the computer, which is particularly useful when native speaker input is not readily available and to elicit learner speech in a quasi-natural environment. They also allow for greater learner autonomy, and facilitate the creation of modules based on effective learning activities at all levels to address needs for accuracy as well as fluency. The present paper reports on two modules which integrate speech technology, (1) a spoken dictogloss, or text reconstruction, module and (2) a pronunciation module. These modules have been implemented in JAVA as part of CARAMILLA, a spoken dialogue-based language learning tool, which is based on an earlier prototype, MILLA. The dictogloss module is being evaluated with two distinct learner groups-adult refugees learning English while living in the host country and learners of Irish, a minority endangered language. The pronunciation module is also being evaluated with the adult refugee group.

This paper presents an autonomous language learning platform which has speech and language technology at its core. An Scéalaí ('the Storyteller') is a web-based interactive iCALL system that allows learners to compose their own text and correct it by listening to the text spoken with synthetic voices (aural proofing) and by responding to NLP prompts that detect errors. All learner interactions are logged and monitored, allowing researchers to observe the learning processes. A pilot study by 14 learners of Irish in the US was conducted to explore the efficacy of the corrective mechanisms currently implemented in the platform. The results of the pilot study indicate that both mechanisms currently on offer were effective in the development of writing skills but work in rather different ways. Aural proofing appears to generate an immediate corrective response which indicates that it is serving both to develop awareness of specific phonological contrasts as well as basic phonic rules of the language. In the case of the NLP prompts, corrections were also made, although the data suggest that this is a slower process and that learners may, at least initially, merely be satisfying the system's prompts rather than discovering the grammatical basis of the correction. The pilot has been useful in pointing towards future directions for platform development that can take the needs of this type of adult autonomous learner into account.

A key benefit in intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (iCALL) is that it allows complex linguistic phenomena to be incorporated into digital learning platforms, either for the autonomous learner or to complement classroom teaching. The present paper describes (1) complex phonological/ morphophonemic alternations of Irish, which are problematic for many learners; (2) an iCALL platform, An Scéalaí, which uses speech technology and Natural Language Processing (NLP) prompts to train writing and aural skills-in this paper the target is the morphophonemic alternations of (1); and (3) a perception experiment to guide how the platform might be used for prompt-based self-correction. The perception experiment has been carried out using newly built synthetic voices based on deep neural network technology.

Game-based Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is an area that currently warrants attention, as task-based, interactive, multimodal games increasingly show promise for language learning. This area is inherently multidisciplinary-theories from second language acquisition, games, and psychology must be explored and relevant concepts from each drawn together. Based on extensive research in these three areas and on subsequent evaluation in the context of a newly developed immersive language learning game (Digichaint), this paper proposes nine criteria that should be taken into account both at the design and evaluation stages of game-based CALL platforms.