Search results for "text"
showing 10 items of 8951 documents
Support for end-weight as a determinant of linguistic variation and change
2016
The term end-weight refers to the tendency for bulkier constituents to occur at the end of sentences. While end-weight has occasionally been analysed as a more general short-before-long principle in the sense of Behaghel's (1909–10) Law of Growing Constituents, the operation of end-weight in absolute sentence-final position has until recently lacked empirical verification. This article shows that end-weight effects can be observed in grammatical variation contexts in which language users have a choice between variants that differ in terms of length and degree of explicitness. Using two variation phenomena as a testing ground, we empirically investigate the hypothesis that the more explicit …
Learning from learners: a non-standard direct approach to the teaching of writing skills in EFL in a university context
2016
Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. 'Should you be Persuaded'- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials. In Classroom Concordancing,1-16. Birmingham University. English Language Research Journal 4.). However, the suitability of using learners' output in classroom tasks remains controversial. This paper describes a pilot study in the application of a non-standard direct approach where Spanish university students are invited to reflect on their production. In the experiment, carried out in several sessions…
Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker (‘Boris I am in Becker’). Syntax, semantics and pragmatics of a special naming construction
2016
Constructions such as Germ. Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker (‘Boris I am in Becker’) follow a startling pattern. A quotation (“Ich bin drin”) is inserted in between two constituents of a complex personal-name construction (Boris Becker). The quotation relates to the person bearing this name. Therefore, the whole construction cannot be understood without massive contextual knowledge, i.e. knowing when, where, and why Boris Becker said so, and how this is relevant in the interpretation of the construction. In general, N “CP” N constructions such as Boris “Ich bin drin” Becker not only differ from canonical personal-name constructions such as Boris Becker in requiring the import of background know…
La saisie esthétique, transformation non narrative de la subjectivité
2017
Abstract Post-Greimassian semiotics has worked toward a return to phenomenology, with the aim of studying the sensorial dimension and the body. Most of this research, however, has all but forgotten Greimas’s last book, De imperfection (1987), in which he proposes an original version of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy with the notion of the aesthetic grasp. I propose to reconsider this almost abandoned notion, both from a theoretical point of view (a new version of the catharsis of philosophical aesthetics) and from the vantage of textual descriptions (the short story “The Naked Bosom” by Italo Calvino and the movie Ratatouille).
Sandwich EPP hypothesis: Evidence from child Finnish
2010
It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected byv* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and thev*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional he…
Indexing epistemic incongruence: uy as a formal sign of disagreement in agreement sequences in Spanish
2018
Abstract This study explores epistemic incongruence in Spanish by focusing on the particle uy in Iberian Spanish. It is claimed that this interjection has a basic change-of-state meaning and that it is commonly used to stress disagreement. Despite its general association to disagreement, the particle can be used in agreeing responses, where it also treats the previous turn as problematic. In this sequential environment, however, it is not the content of the previous turn but rather the underlying assumptions (the basic epistemic configuration of an assertion-answer adjacency pair) that are challenged by the second speaker. The evidence for this analysis comes from the sequential context. Ty…
Discursive construction of a high-stakes test: the many faces of a test-taker
2006
As part of a larger project, we studied how a foreign language test got discursively constructed in the talk of upper-secondary-school leavers. A group of students were asked to keep an oral diary to record their ideas, feelings and experiences of preparing for and taking the test over the last spring term of school, as part of a high-stakes national examination. In addition, they took part in discussions either in pairs or groups of three after having learned about the final test results. After transcribing the data, drawing on a form of discourse analysis originally launched by a group of social psychologists, we identified (at least) four interpretative repertoires in the students’ acco…
Readability and the Web
2012
Readability indices measure how easy or difficult it is to read and comprehend a text. In this paper we look at the relation between readability indices and web documents from two different perspectives. On the one hand we analyse how to reliably measure the readability of web documents by applying content extraction techniques and incorporating a bias correction. On the other hand we investigate how web based corpus statistics can be used to measure readability in a novel and language independent way.
ABDUCTIVE INFERENCES IN PRAGMATIC PROCESSES
2018
Abstract In pragmatic theories, the notion of inference plays a central role, together with the communicative act in which it is activated. Although some scholars, such as Levinson, Sperber and Wilson, propose detailed and accurate analyses of this notion, we will maintain that these analyses can be better systematized if seen through Peirce’s notion of abduction. We will try to maintain that the variety of inferential processes in play in a linguistic act is mostly of an abductive nature. Moreover, we will maintain that the typological tripartition of abductions discussed by Eco (1981) allows to account for a signi cant part of the mechanisms involved in the comprehension of an utterance, …
Semi-automated annotation of page-based documents within the Genre and Multimodality framework
2016
This paper describes ongoing work on a tool developed for annotating document images for their multimodal features and compiling this information into a corpus. The tool leverages open source computer vision and natural language processing libraries to describe the content and structure of multimodal documents and to generate multiple layers of XML annotation. The paper introduces the annotation schema, describes the document processing pipeline and concludes with a brief description of future work.