“You must, pardon, you should” - Being polite across cultures

Drawing on an empirical study undertaken in 1998-9 and 2008, this paper suggests a renewed and refreshing view (Micklos 2001: 5) on an ever-problem posing issue as is the role of modality in communicative and intercultural competence. In fact, this diachronic case study aims at reassessing some evidence on EFL learners’/undergraduates’ reading habits in a FL context, grounded on empirical research undertaken in Madeira Island in 1998-1999 compared with data collected in 2008. The former involved a representative number of informants: 12 th form Humanities students ( n = 197) and first- and second-year undergraduates ( n = 57) taking English - Joint Honours - at the University of Madeira. Their response to a questionnaire on reading habits, purposes, strategies and text types in English as a foreign language, has offered renewed insights on a changing trend in the use of modals by EFL undergraduates for global communication. The analysis of respondents’ use of modals (1998/9-2008) unearths a shifting cline from the use of “must” to “should”. Consequently, it is necessary to ponder on how demands of a society associated with globalisation have affected patterns of education / instruction in both secondary and higher education. In this paper it is thus argued that fostering speakers’ linguistic and discursive awareness with an emphasis on the grammatical, pragmatic and semantic levels, contrastively, contributes to speakers’ awareness of specificities of both their mother tongue and foreign/additional language in a dialogic and dynamic way

Anaphora and Discourse Structure

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistic

The AAU Multimodal Annotation Toolboxes: Annotating Objects in Images and Videos

This tech report gives an introduction to two annotation toolboxes that enable the creation of pixel and polygon-based masks as well as bounding boxes around objects of interest. Both toolboxes support the annotation of sequential images in the RGB and thermal modalities. Each annotated object is assigned a classification tag, a unique ID, and one or more optional meta data tags. The toolboxes are written in C++ with the OpenCV and Qt libraries and are operated by using the visual interface and the extensive range of keyboard shortcuts. Pre-built binaries are available for Windows and MacOS and the tools can be built from source under Linux as well. So far, tens of thousands of frames have been annotated using the toolboxes.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figure

High School students' participation and the provision of choice

Tesis (Profesor de Inglés para la Enseñanza Básica y Media y al grado académico de Licenciado en Educación)Participation has been studied by many researchers during the last years. Researchers and important authorities related to the educational field highlight the importance of having students who actively participate inside the classrooms. Participation promotes interaction, which is a key element in the acquisition of a new language, and for this reason, when it comes to English classes, participation becomes even more important. Even though many researchers have been focusing their studies on analyzing in-class participation, there is a lack of studies in which students’ perceptions about their own participation are considered. Due to the importance of participation, many people have tried to come out with ideas, class methodologies and techniques that could enhance participation. Little is known about the provision of choice within classes however, studies on the topic have shown that the provision of choice, when offered in an appropriate way, could be beneficial for the creation of a sense of autonomy on students, and more specifically on adolescents. For the aim of the current study to be fulfill, the provision of choice will be considered as the opportunity for the meaningful realization of the individual’s desires or preferences related to class materials. The purpose of the current study is to understand high school students’ classroom participation views, and explore whether the provision of choice could somehow influence their perceptions about participation. An explanatory study using a mixed-method research design was used. A survey, a quantitative instrument, was utilized at the beginning of this investigation in order to select 5 out of 41 students from a ninth grade of a subsidized school. Classes in the school selected for this study were focused mainly on grammar and the participation rate inside the classroom was low therefore, it was considered a perfect scenario for the current study. After the survey, a first interview was done to the five participant of this study with the purpose of knowing students’ perceptions about participation and the concept of choice. Then, an intervention in which the provision of choice was given to the students with the use of class material took place. Finally, another interview was held in order to know if students’ perceptions about participation and choice had changed after the intervention. Results showed that in general students considered participation as an important factor inside the classroom; however, they did not feel comfortable participating orally in class. Finally, the results demonstrated that the provision of choice influenced students’ perceptions about participation within English sessions

Grammar practice : theory and practice

Fil: Luque Colombres, María Candelaria. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Meehan, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Oliva, María Belén. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Rius, Natalia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: de Maussion, Ana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Neyra, Vanina Pamela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Our main objective when writing this handbook has been to design some kind of material that would provide the first-year university student at Facultad de Lenguas with the basic foundations of English grammar. Although this handout could be used as a self-study grammar guide, the student should bear in mind it is meant to be used as a complement of class work. Therefore, the material included in the present publication has not been organized according to the level of difficulty, but rather in accordance with the syllabus of the subject. Each chapter brings along graded exercises which have been carefully designed to improve and consolidate the grammar topics included in the syllabus of the subject. Finally, we would like to point out that to round off each unit, we have decided to include texts (often authentic ones) in an attempt to offer the student a new perspective on the subject: one which relates grammatical structure systematically to meaning and use.Fil: Luque Colombres, María Candelaria. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Meehan, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Oliva, María Belén. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Rius, Natalia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: de Maussion, Ana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Neyra, Vanina Pamela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina

The Interactional Styles Used by Male and Female Chairpersons in Petra Christian University Student Executive Board Meetings

This study examines the interactional styles related to the role of chairperson used by two female and two male chairpersons in the SEB-PCU meetings. There are three main theories used: interactional styles, gender, and chairpersons and their roles in a meeting. The method used is qualitative approach focusing on the process and the data. The findings reveal that both feminine and masculine interactional styles were used by the chairpersons. The masculine interactional styles were employed to play the roles of chairpersons. The use of interactional styles between female and male chairpersons differs in its ratio although the same linguistic clue was used for the same device. Here, conciliatory feature was not produced by the male chairpersons whereas referentially oriented feature was produced frequently by chairpersons. Overall, it proves that females use more feminine interactional styles while males use more masculine interactional styles. Thus, gender and power play an important role in meeting

A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference

This paper introduces the Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference (MultiNLI) corpus, a dataset designed for use in the development and evaluation of machine learning models for sentence understanding. In addition to being one of the largest corpora available for the task of NLI, at 433k examples, this corpus improves upon available resources in its coverage: it offers data from ten distinct genres of written and spoken English--making it possible to evaluate systems on nearly the full complexity of the language--and it offers an explicit setting for the evaluation of cross-genre domain adaptation.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figures, 5 tables. v2 corrects a misreported accuracy number for the CBOW model in the 'matched' setting. v3 adds a discussion of the difficulty of the corpus to the analysis section. v4 is the version that was accepted to NAACL201

On negation in yes/no questions in Serbo-Croatian

The phenomenon discussed in this paper is the so-called expletive negation in negated yes/no questions in Serbo-Croatian. The term expletive negation seems, at this point to be a useful descriptive term for the phenomenon in question. One of the goals of this paper, however, is to show that it is not the correct one. Proposing the existence of semantically vacuous negation is the consequence of the assumption that sentential negation has a fixed position in the clausal hierarchy (Brown and Franks 1995). This approach cannot account for the relevant data in Serbo-Croatian. My claim is that the cases under consideration involve an alternative position of NegP in Serbo-Croatian, above TP. It is confined to the derivation of one semantic type of negated yes/no interrogatives, and it cannot trigger negative concord