(Dis)agreements in Iranians’ internet relay chats

The present study on politeness is an attempt to examine (dis)agreeing strategies utilized by EFL learners while chatting on the internet. Subjects of the study were forty male and thirty-three female Iranian natives whose internet relay chat (IRC) interactions, composed of 400 excerpts, were collected between December 2007 and September 2008. Data analysis was based on the general taxonomy of politeness strategies suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987) which is the baseline of many politeness studies today. The results indicate that IRC is a mode of communication whose characteristics are typically different from face-to-face and real-life conversational settings. Some common face threatening acts (FTAs) like ‘direct disagreements’ are performed widely in chat channels. Furthermore, gender-oriented differences were found not to be statistically significant on the internet

Characterizing the Response Space of Questions: data and theory

The main aim of this paper is to provide a characterization of the response space for questions using a taxonomy grounded in a dialogical formal semantics. As a starting point we take the typology for responses in the form of questions provided in \cite{lupginz-jlm}. This work develops a wide coverage taxonomy for question/question sequences observable in corpora including the BNC, CHILDES, and BEE, as well as formal modeling of all the postulated classes. Our aim is to extend this work to cover \emph{all} responses to questions. We present the extended typology of responses to questions based on a corpus studies of BNC, BEE, Maptask and CornellMovie with include 506, 262, 467, and 678 question/response pairs respectively. We compare the data for English with data from Polish using the Spokes corpus (694 question/response pairs). We discuss annotation reliability and disagreement analysis. We sketch how each class can be formalized using a dialogical semantics appropriate for dialogue management

FROM SEMANTIC TO EMOTIONAL SPACE IN SENSE SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

The Surface Compositional Semantics of English Intonation

This paper proposes a syntax and a semantics for intonation in English and some related languages. The semantics is “surface-compositional”, in the sense that syntactic derivation constructs information-structural logical form monotonically, without rules of structural revision, and without autonomous rules of “focus projection. ” This is made possible by the generalized notion of syntactic constituency afforded by Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG)—in particular, the fact that its rules are restricted to string-adjacent type-driven combination. In this way, the grammar unites intonation structure and information structure with surface-syntactic derivational structure and Montague-style compositional semantics, even when they deviate radically from traditional surface structure. The paper revises and extends earlier CCG-based accounts of intonational semantics, grounding hitherto informal notions like “theme ” and “rheme ” (a.k.a. “topic ” and “comment,” “presupposition ” and “focus, ” etc.) and “background ” and “contrast ” (a.k.a. “given ” and “new”, “focus”, etc.) in a logic of speaker/hearer supposition and update, using a version of Rooth’s Alternative Semantics. A CCG grammar fragment is defined which constrains language-specific intonation and its interpretation more narrowly than previous attempts. ∗ 1. INTRODUCTION. Th

Raising Greek high-school students’ awareness of conversational implicatures with the use of corpora

Τα τελευταία χρόνια ιδιαίτερη έμφαση έχει δοθεί στην διδασκαλία της πραγματολογίας γενικά (Kasper, 1997; Rose and Kasper, 2001; Rose, 2005) και ειδικότερα στην αξία της διδασκαλίας της πραγματολογίας κατά την εκμάθηση της Αγγλικής ως ξένη γλώσσα (Tanaka, 1997; Lee, 2002; Taguchi, 2002; Alcón Soler, 2005; Taguchi, 2005; Aksoyalp and Toprak, 2015). Ωστόσο, παρόλο που οι Έλληνες μαθητές διδάσκονται αγγλικά από πολύ νεαρή ηλικία, αυτό που στην πραγματικότητα δημιουργείται είναι μια γενιά ικανών χρηστών της Αγγλικής που αντιμετωπίζουν πρόβλημα ανεπαρκούς κατανόησης όταν επικοινωνούν διαπολιτισμικά λόγω της έλλειψης πραγματολογικών γνώσεων. Η παρούσα μελέτη στοχεύει να διερευνήσει την εξοικείωση των Ελλήνων μαθητών λυκείου με την έννοια των ‘implicatures’ (υπονοούμενα) και να καλύψει ένα σημαντικό κενό στον τομέα της διδασκαλίας τους κατά το μάθημα των αγγλικών σε τάξεις ελληνικών σχολείων με αποτελέσματα που μπορούν να αποδειχθούν καθολικά για τη διδασκαλία των ‘implicatures’ στα αγγλικά αλλά και σε άλλες γλώσσες. Οι κύριοι στόχοι μου ήταν η αξιολόγηση της επίδρασης της διδασκαλίας των ‘implicatures’ με τη χρήση αυθεντικών κειμένων που ανακτήθηκαν από σώματα κειμένων (corpora) και η ανάπτυξη διδακτικού υλικού που μπορεί να αποδειχθεί χρήσιμο για την βελτίωση και την αξιολόγηση της πραγματολογικής επίγνωσης των μαθητών. Η μελέτη μου είχε ως στόχο να προσφέρει μια ολοκληρωμένη προσέγγιση για την αύξηση της πραγματολογικής ευαισθητοποίησης (Ifantidou, 2014) των μαθητών, καθώς περιλάμβανε υλικό βασισμένο σε παραδείγματα της πραγματικής ζωής (Boulton and Landure, 2016). Επιπλέον, επικεντρώθηκε σε πιο δημιουργικά ‘implicatures’ παρά σε συμβατικά, τα οποία είναι τυποποιημένα και, επομένως, μπορούν να επεξεργαστούν πιο εύκολα από τους μαθητές χωρίς να προκαλέσουν σοβαρά επικοινωνιακά προβλήματα (Vega, 2007). Προς αυτή την κατεύθυνση, υιοθετήθηκε το θεωρητικό πλαίσιο της Relevance Theory (Θεωρία Συνάφειας) (Carston, 2001; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Wilson, 2009) και ακολουθήθηκε η διαδικασία ‘pre-test – teaching sessions on implicature—post-test’ τόσο για την πιλοτική όσο και για την κύρια μελέτη. Μετά την ποσοτική και ποιοτική αξιολόγηση των ευρημάτων, συνήχθη το συμπέρασμα ότι αυτό που καθιστά τo συγκεκριμένo υλικό κατάλληλο για διδασκαλία είναι το γεγονός ότι βασίστηκε αποκλειστικά σε αυθεντικές πηγές και όχι σε παραδοσιακά, μη αυθεντικά κείμενα που δεν εκθέτουν οι μαθητές στην πραγματική χρήση της γλώσσας. Επιβεβαιώθηκε επίσης ότι η διαδικασία ανάκτησης των ‘implicatures’ μπορεί να είναι ένας σημαντικός παράγοντας για τους μαθητές προκειμένου να επεξεργάζονται τη γλώσσα μόνοι τους. Τέλος, επαληθεύτηκε ότι η Relevance Theory για την προσέγγιση των ‘implicatures’ είναι πιο ακριβής και σαφέστερη όταν πρόκειται για τον ορισμό τους και είναι ιδιαίτερα ωφέλιμη για τους εκπαιδευτικούς που θέλουν να δώσουν έμφαση στα συμφραζόμενα (context).Over recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the teaching of pragmatics in general (Kasper, 1997; Rose and Kasper, 2001; Rose, 2005) and to the value of explicit teaching of pragmatics in an EFL classroom in particular (Tanaka, 1997; Lee, 2002; Taguchi, 2002; Alcón Soler, 2005; Taguchi, 2005; Aksoyalp and Toprak, 2015). In the Greek EFL context, although English is taught from a very young age, proficient Greek speakers of English are confronted with several misunderstandings when communicating cross-culturally. The present research aimed to investigate the familiarity of Greek high-school students with the concept of implicature and fill in a considerable gap within the field of teaching pragmatics in the EFL classroom of Greek schools, hoping that it may influence the teaching of implicatures in English, and possibly also in other languages. My main purpose was, on the one hand, to evaluate the effect of explicit teaching of implicatures with the use of authentic texts retrieved from corpora and, on the other hand, to develop teaching and testing materials with a view to raising and assessing learners’ pragmatic awareness. My research aimed to offer a complete approach to raising learners’ pragmatic awareness (as defined in Ifantidou, 2014) as it encompassed both teaching and testing materials based on real-life examples retrieved from corpora (Boulton and Landure, 2016). Moreover, it focused on creative conversational implicatures rather than conventional ones, since conventionalized implicatures are formulaic and patterned and can, thus, be processed more easily by EFL learners without causing serious communicational breakdowns (Vega, 2007). Towards that direction, the relevance-theoretic framework was adopted (Carston, 2001; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Wilson, 2009) and the process of pre-test, teaching sessions on implicatures, post-test was followed both during the pilot and the main studies. After the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the findings, it was concluded that what made particularized conversational implicatures amenable to teaching is the fact that they appeared in contexts retrieved from authentic resources instead of traditional, expository and non-authentic texts, which fail to expose learners to real-life language. It was also confirmed that the process of implicature retrieval may be a crucial factor for induction, and advantageous for learners to process language on their own. Finally, it was verified that the relevance-theoretic approach to implicatures is more adequate when it comes to defining what an implicature is and provides the most plausible approach for teachers who intend to assign prominence to the role of context in implicature retrieval

Interpreting and generating indirect answers

This paper presents an implemented computational model for interpreting and generating indirect answers to yes-no questions in English. Interpretation and generation are treated, respectively, as recognition of and construction of a responder's discourse plan for a full answer. An indirect answer is the result of the responder providing only part of the planned response, but intending for his discourse plan to be recognized by the questioner. Discourse plan construction and recognition make use of shared knowledge of discourse strategies, represented in the model by discourse plan operators. In the operators, coherence relations are used to characterize types of information that may accompany each type of answer. Recognizing a mutually plausible coherence relation obtaining between the actual response and a possible direct answer plays an important role in recognizing the responder's discourse plan. During generation, stimulus conditions model a speaker's motivation for selecting a satellite. Also during generation, the speaker uses his own interpretation capability to determine what parts of the plan are inferable by the hearer and thus do not need to be explicitly given. The model provides wider coverage than previous computational models for generating and interpreting indirect answers and extends the plan-based theory of implicature in several ways