Manifestations of identity and alterity in English: Between semantic divergence and structural convergence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is an attempt to investigate the divergences in meaning of the variants of English spoken worldwide under the semantic and structural perspective. From the philosophical standpoint, the identity/alterity dichotomy and/or unity is applicable to the scope of this article in that structural convergence falls under the definition of identity, whereas the semantic divergence is defined by the philosophical category of alterity. It is well-known that due to several factors as geographical isolation, cultural identity, regional features, along with others, have led to the development of new connotations ranging from shades of meaning to utterly novel significances, which may puzzle both native speakers originating from other regions or the non-native speakers. One of the aims of the present article is to elucidate the different meanings ascribed to the same words or structures in relation to the variants of English spoken in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia, and a special emphasis has been put on the underlying differences between British and American concepts that may lead to ambiguities, which subsequently may grow into misunderstandings. Another aspect that we have considered here is the translation into Romanian of sentences containing such structures with differing concepts depending on the region where it is used. The third focus of this paper is to provide meaningful recommendations to the translators and/or language learners on avoiding the translation traps and correctly get the message of the sentence where a regionalism has been in use, or on being able to timely identify the non-standard meaning of the word. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of meanings attributed to English structures worldwide (alterity) is thought of as an asset rather than a loophole not only by linguists who study the incongruent-pace evolution of English in different corners of the world, but by the native speakers as well. Incidentally, thinkers as Levinas, Castoriadis, and Baudrillard describe the alterity as a transcendent phenomenon stimulating diversity, and hence, progress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".