Detecting Satire in Italian Political Commentaries

This paper presents computational work to detect satire/sarcasm in long commentaries on Italian politics. It uses the lexica extracted from the manual annotation based on Appraisal Theory, of some 30 K word texts. The underlying hypothesis is that using this framework it is possible to precisely pinpoint ironic content through the deep semantic analysis of evaluative judgement and appreciation. The paper presents the manual annotation phase realized on 112 texts by two well-known Italian journalists. After a first experimentation phase based on the lexica extracted from the xml output files, we proceeded to retag lexical entries dividing them up into two subclasses: figurative and literal meaning. Finally more fine-grained Appraisal features have been derived and more experiments have been carried out and compared to results obtained by a lean sentiment analysis. The final output is produced from held out texts to verify the usefulness of the lexica and the Appraisal theory in detecting ironic content

Annotating Satire in Italian Political Commentaries with Appraisal Theory

This paper presents annotation work to manually classify satire/sarcasm in long commentaries on Italian politics. It is based on Appraisal Theory and uses some 30K word texts. The underlying hypothesis is that using this framework it is possible to pinpoint precisely the deep semantic contents of evaluative judgements and appreciations making up an ironic comment. We performed a high level annotation using major categories, and then refined the classification starting from the lexica derived from the xml annotated files. In this way we succeeded in differentiating texts by the two authors we chose, one of which is characterized by a sharp cutting ironic/almost sarcastic style

Arthur Annesley, Margaret Cavendish, and Neo-Latin History

This article explores a hitherto unstudied copy of De vita […] Guilielmi ducis Novo-Castrensis (1668)—a Latin translation of The Life of William Cavendish (1667) by Margaret Cavendish (1623?–1673)—that Arthur Annesley (1614–1686), the First Earl of Anglesey, has heavily annotated. While Annesley owned the largest private library in seventeenth-century Britain, his copy of De vita is by far the most densely glossed of his identifiable books, with no fewer than sixty-one Latin and Greek annotations, not to mention numerous corrections and non-verbal markers. By studying Annesley’s careful treatment of De vita, this essay makes an intervention into the burgeoning fields of reading and library history along with neo-Latin studies. I propose that Annesley filled the margins of De vita with quotations from Latin poets, scholars, philosophers, and historians—rather than his personal views—in a bid to form a politically impartial outlook on the British Civil Wars that was attuned to broader historical or even mythological trends.Peer reviewe

Biographical and critical miscellanies

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Lucian in the Renaissance: the Latin and Vernacular Traditions in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy and their Interactions with Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More

My thesis explores the influence of Lucian of Samosata, a satirist and rhetorician of Syrian origin who lived in the second century A.D., on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian authors and on Northern authors who contributed to Lucian’s revival during the sixteenth century. Lucian’s corpus consists of about eighty texts, mostly dialogues, all composed in Greek. Though they were read widely in Byzantium, they remained unknown during the Latin Middle Ages. In 1397, Manuel Chrysoloras, a distinguished Byzantine scholar and diplomat, began to teach Greek in Florence and used Lucian’s writings, among other ancient works, as textbooks for this purpose. This moment represents the starting point of my thesis, which has three parts. The first, after having outlined the reception of Lucian in Quattrocento Italy, discusses the encounter between Lucian and his main fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century humanist admirers. By reviving the Lucianic dialogue, Leon Battista Alberti distanced himself from the Ciceronian model that he, like others, regarded as dominant in his age, opening thereby a new creative path in Renaissance literature. Giovanni Pontano, while taking aim at, for the most part, the same satirical targets as Alberti, sought to find a point of convergence between Lucianic and Ciceronian dialogue. By contrast, in Ferrara, humanists and authors writing mainly in the vernacular adapted Lucian’s sharp irony to the sensibility of a refined Renaissance court. The second part of my thesis analyses how, at the beginning of the Cinquecento, two Northern humanists, Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, gave Lucianic satire a new direction, by infusing it with theological meanings. The third and final part focuses on a group of sixteenth-century Italian writers usually known as poligrafi, among them Niccolò Franco, Ortensio Lando and Anton Francesco Doni. The defining trait of their satirical compositions is that they filtered their understanding and reinvention of Lucian through the Lucianic works of Erasmus and More

Goethe's glosses to translation

The logical and illogical unity of translation with a triadic approach was mediated by Peirce's three-way semiotics of sign, object, and interpretant. Semiotranslation creates a dynamic network of Peircean interpretants, which deal with artificial but alive signs progressively growing from undetermined ("bad") versions to higher determined ("good") translations. The three-way forms of translation were mentioned by Goethe. He imitated the old Persian poetry of Hafiz (14th Century) to compose his German paraphrase of West-östlicher Divan (1814–1819). To justify the liberties of his own translation/paraphrase, Goethe furnished notes in Noten und Abhandlungen and Paralipomena (1818–1819). Through his critical glosses, he explained information, adaptation, and reproduction of the foreign culture and literature (old Persian written in Arabic script) to become transplanted into the "equivalent" in German 19th Century verse. As critical patron of translation and cultural agent, Goethe's Divan notes are a parody mixing Orient and Occident. He built a (lack of) likeness, pointing in the pseudo-semiosis of translation to first and second degenerate types of object and sign