Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

ECIR 2018: Text2Story Workshop-Narrative Extraction from Texts

The 1st International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story 2018) was held in conjunction with the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval, ECIR 2018, Grenoble on the 26th March 2018. The workshop aimed to help foster the collaboration of researchers on a wide range of multidisciplinary issues related to the text-to-narrative- structure. The program consisted of two keynote talks, six research presentations, a poster session and a slot for demo presentations. This report briefly summarizes the workshop.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

South Slavic Oral Tradition and its Textualization

The concept of the transitional text has so far had a destiny of the spectre of oral studies – its disturbing presence occasionally comes into view, but somehow without a proper recognition and place in the real world. Initially rejected and then accepted by Albert Lord (1960: 129, 1986a: 479–481), the term subsequently gained certain currency among the leading theorists (Foley 1988, Finnegan 1992: 116), only to be questioned again in the more recent scholarship (Jensen 1998: 94–114, 2008: 50). By revisiting Lord’s analyses and South Slavic oral and written tradition, this article describes transitional texts as a distinctive generic form involving two principal modes of enunciation – literary notion of fixed textuality and oral performative principle of composition in performance in traditional oral-formulaic language. Following the discussions of Lord and Foley, it also offers a synthetic framework for their analysis, based on the phraseology, style, outlook and contextual evidences about their documentation and singers. South Slavic tradition offers a continuum of published texts with various degrees of oral traditionality, and upon closer examination some turn out to be literary works written by educated poets familiar with oral tradition, whereas others are nothing more but fixed, fossilized texts that do not involve oral composition in performance and are not part of a living oral tradition (see also: Miletich 1988: 100–102). But this still leaves us with a number of examples that involve both oral and written attitudes and techniques of composition and cannot be reduced to either. After examining early nineteenth-century examples of the emerging literary influence on the still predominantly oral Montenegrin culture of the time, I will argue that such transitional South Slavic texts emerged in two principal ways, either by educated writers adjusting their literary technique to accommodate an oral traditional content, or by oral singers appropriating originally literary characteristics to their oral performative manner and style. In the final instance, the article advocates that a consistent theoretical model of transitional texts can provide leverage for comparative studies of the contacts between orality and literacy, and invites further analyses of the interpellations between oral and literary culture in other traditions

The structure of discussion: a discourse analytical approach to the identification of structure in the text type 'discussion'

This study is concerned with the structural analysis of a corpus of discussive data. The data, mainly taken from CANCODE, the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English, was taken from a range of situational contexts, along a cline of formality from informal �chat� to public broadcast material. The data was analysed using a version of the Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) model of discourse, which was adapted to deal with spoken discussion, and the resultant analytical framework was described in detail. Previous studies of discussion and argumentation have looked either at intra-turn structure, or at the local management of disagreement between turns. This study aims to provide an overall analysis of the structure of discussion, with a view to elucidating the argumentative and persuasive strategies used by interactants involved in spontaneous spoken discussion. It is argued that discourse acts can be identified through the study of certain lexico-grammatical items which typically realise them, and that both at act level and at move level elements of structure combine to form a type of patterning which is typical to discussive texts. It is further argued that this patterning reflects various aspects of the �nature� of discussion, such as its combativeness, and the way that interpersonal objectives become less important in this type of interaction. Also the emergent nature of opinion in discussion is reflected in interactants� use of focussing moves and summarising acts, and points of convergence between interactants can be identified through their use of responding moves

Right Dislocation and Afterthought in German - Investigations on Multiple Levels

When investigating the right sentence periphery in German, two constructions are encountered that appear to be rather similar at first glance: right dislocation and afterthought. Irrespective of this superficial similarity, right dislocation and afterthought can be distinguished at multiple levels of linguistic description. This thesis aims at providing a more nuanced understanding of right dislocation and afterthought by providing empirical investigations, both qualitative and quantitative in nature, employing analyses of experimentally acquired data as well as corpus analyses. It is shown that right dislocation and afterthought are best defined on the basis of the functions they take in discourse rather than on the basis of their prosodic realisations, and that their functional differences are reflected in a number of linguistic parameters, such as their morpho-syntactic con¬straints as well as their degree of syntactic integratedness, their prosodic features, and even their punctuation in written texts

The structure of discussion: a discourse analytical approach to the identification of structure in the text type 'discussion'

This study is concerned with the structural analysis of a corpus of discussive data. The data, mainly taken from CANCODE, the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English, was taken from a range of situational contexts, along a cline of formality from informal �chat� to public broadcast material. The data was analysed using a version of the Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) model of discourse, which was adapted to deal with spoken discussion, and the resultant analytical framework was described in detail. Previous studies of discussion and argumentation have looked either at intra-turn structure, or at the local management of disagreement between turns. This study aims to provide an overall analysis of the structure of discussion, with a view to elucidating the argumentative and persuasive strategies used by interactants involved in spontaneous spoken discussion. It is argued that discourse acts can be identified through the study of certain lexico-grammatical items which typically realise them, and that both at act level and at move level elements of structure combine to form a type of patterning which is typical to discussive texts. It is further argued that this patterning reflects various aspects of the �nature� of discussion, such as its combativeness, and the way that interpersonal objectives become less important in this type of interaction. Also the emergent nature of opinion in discussion is reflected in interactants� use of focussing moves and summarising acts, and points of convergence between interactants can be identified through their use of responding moves

Unlocking environmental narratives: towards understanding human environment interactions through computational text analysis

Understanding the role of humans in environmental change is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Environmental narratives – written texts with a focus on the environment – offer rich material capturing relationships between people and surroundings. We take advantage of two key opportunities for their computational analysis: massive growth in the availability of digitised contemporary and historical sources, and parallel advances in the computational analysis of natural language. We open by introducing interdisciplinary research questions related to the environment and amenable to analysis through written sources. The reader is then introduced to potential collections of narratives including newspapers, travel diaries, policy documents, scientific proposals and even fiction. We demonstrate the application of a range of approaches to analysing natural language computationally, introducing key ideas through worked examples, and providing access to the sources analysed and accompanying code. The second part of the book is centred around case studies, each applying computational analysis to some aspect of environmental narrative. Themes include the use of language to describe narratives about glaciers, urban gentrification, diversity and writing about nature and ways in which locations are conceptualised and described in nature writing. We close by reviewing the approaches taken, and presenting an interdisciplinary research agenda for future work. The book is designed to be of interest to newcomers to the field and experienced researchers, and set out in a way that it can be used as an accompanying text for graduate level courses in, for example, geography, environmental history or the digital humanities