The Right to Property Taking Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights Seriously

The right to property is part of International Human Rights Law (IHRL). However, the right is conspicuously missing from some fundamental treaties, and there are important inconsistencies in its interpretation by regional and global human rights bodies. In light of the indeterminacy and polysemy of IHRL in relation to property, this paper articulates a proposal to rethink this right taking Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR) seriously. The proposal contains four propositions. Firstly, property is a human right. Secondly, it includes private property as one of its forms, but this is not the only one. Thirdly, property has a social function. And fourthly, as a matter of proportionality, fulfilling ESCR is one of the most important objectives that may justify the limitation of private property.

Improved class-specific vector for biomedical question type classification

Polysemy is a constant issue in biomedical terms which also affects its QA system. In our work, we consider polysemous words as weak aspect in biomedical question classification and propose two vector model-based solutions that determine the class-specific features of biomedical terms. In first approach, label independent class vector and general word vector are combined using linear compositionality property of vector to generate multiple class-specific embeddings of words. Second is the feature fusion approach, which combines the class-specific sense vector of a word with vectors generated in the first approach. Besides this, a survey dataset COVID-S is introduced in this paper, which is a collection of public queries, myths, and doubts about novel COVID-19 diseases. The series of experiments are performed on two biomedical questions datasets, BioASQ8b and COVID-S, and the results of comparisons with other state-of-arts prove its integrity using SVM and naïve Bayes.

From reductive to generative crisis: businesspeople using polysemous justifications to make sense of COVID-19.

Both lay understandings of crisis moments and influential psychological models of cognition in times of uncertainty emphasize how crises limit thinking. Conversely, scholars as diverse as Foucault, Swidler, Bourdieu, and Butler have elaborated generative conceptions of crisis, which specify crises as moments of change, transformation, and heightened cognition. The research presented here takes up the question of how crises become thinkable, as actors gradually make sense of a newly uncertain context. Against a backdrop of polarization on the topic, in-depth interviews with 60 businesspeople navigating the coronavirus pandemic show that they see public health and economic well-being as interrelated. This has important effects on how businesses interpret and implement government directives and public health guidelines, from choosing to close before being mandated to do so, to staying closed even when allowed to reopen. Taken together, these findings substantiate generative models of crisis while drawing attention to the polysemous justifications elaborated by actors as they navigate shifting cultural and social scaffoldings.

Semantics of the virolect with particular regard to the Hungarian language

Introduction: the COVID-19 pandemic has a major impact on the various arenas of communication. The most striking language changes can be observed in the lexicon. Since 2020, thousands of new pandemic-related words and phrases, so-called virologisms, appeared in many languages of the world, including the Hungarian, English, German and Russian. It is worthwhile to examine virologisms from a word-formation aspect and a semantic aspect. The present study focuses mainly on the semantics of the Hungarian virologisms. Linguistic examples are reviewed from the aspect of lexical (i.e. word) relationships such as synonymy, polysemy, or homonymy. Objective: to identify the semantics of virologisms of the Hungarian language (in comparison with the English, German and Russian). Research materials: published articles, studies and dictionaries in the Hungarian, Russian and English languages with particular regard to the Karanténszótár, COVIDictionary and Slovarj russkogo jazyka koronavirusnoj epochi (Dictionary of the Russian Language of the Coronavirus Era). Results and novelty of the research: to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no comprehensive work presenting an analysis of virologisms from a semantic aspect has been published, up to the beginning of 2022 in the Hungarian or in any other language they are familiar with, as the majority of the studies approach the problem from a formal perspective. The present study points out intra-lexical and inter-lexical semantic relationships (e.g. synonymy, polysemy, and homonymy) that can be observed between lexemes belonging to the same language register and those belonging to different language registers: while synonymy makes the talk about the pandemic more colorful, polysemy and homonymy can sometimes be a source of misunderstanding. © 2022 Ob-Ugric Institute of Applied Researches and Development. All rights reserved.

Metonymy and the polysemy of Covid in Italian

Among the linguistic consequences of the current pandemic, we focus on the usage of the lexeme Covid(-19) in Italian, both in the language of the daily press and in institutional/technical language. More specifically, we analyze the range of its polysemy and the role of metonymy in the semantic shifts that have produced it. The salience of the highly infectious pathogen, which also prompted its metaphorical reconceptualization, triggered the first extension of the term, originally denoting the disease, to predominantly denote the virus that causes it. This has also resulted in an almost complete shift of grammatical gender from feminine to masculine. Beside the primary metonymic shift, Covid(-19) developed a variety of further meanings which highlight different components of the emerging COVID FRAME. The linguistic data are drawn from La Repubblica, a daily general-interest newspaper, and from a selection of texts by major governmental and health institutions.