128 research outputs found
Semantic verb classes in Tima (Niger-Congo)
The dissertation explores the correlations between the lexical meaning of verbs and their morphosyntactic behavior in terms of valency alternation patterns in the Niger-Congo language Tima spoken in Sudan
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Arts, Leisure, and the Construction of âGentlemanlyâ (shi 棫) Identities in 7thâ14th Century China
Historians regularly conceive of âgentlemenâ (shi 棫) in 7thâ14th century China as men belonging to an elite social stratum, defined by their study of the classical and literary canons, participation in the civil service examinations, officeholding in the imperial bureaucracy, engagement in various literary or intellectual undertakings, hereditary status from a patriline, or connection to certain marriage, kinship, or friendship networks. This dissertation seeks to expand as well as complicate this perception of âgentlemenâ as a social category, by understanding the label as referring not to an elite social stratum but to an identity, internalized and enacted in a variety of ways by men in low and high social positions alike. Using this framework to analyze the construction of âgentlemanlyâ identities in various arts and activities that served as leisure for some and livelihoods for others, this dissertation reveals a significant expansion in the repertory of signals and strategies used to create and perform âgentlemanlyâ identities in these fields, reshaping what it meant to be a âgentlemanâ in middle period China.
Each chapter draws upon extensive source material from libraries, digital databases, and museums, to examine processes of identity construction and presentation in a series of different arts or activities in which both the âgentlemanlyâ and ânon-gentlemanlyâ participated: painting, music making, practicing medicine, divining, farming and gardening, fishing and woodcutting, and playing the board game weiqi ćæŁ (also known as go). In each of these fields, between the 7th and 14th centuries, new âgentlemanlyâ identity signals were constructed to distinguish the âgentlemanlyâ sort from social categories like âartisanâ (gong ć·„) that they viewed as inferior. New kinds of âgentlemenâ like the âqin-zither gentlemanâ (qinshi çŽćŁ«), âpainting gentlemanâ (huashi ç«ćŁ«), and âclassicist physicianâ (ruyi ćé«) emerged; older labels like ârecluseâ (yinshi é±ćŁ«) expanded to encompass a wider variety of ways of living. New offices and titles at court were created that could signal membership in âgentlemanlyâ communities despite a close connection with arts like medicine or painting. And beyond these labels, men developed new âgentlemanlyâ identities through distinct modes of engagement in the respective field: the way one divined othersâ fates, the strategies one used to win a board game, the metaphysical elements and ideals expressed in oneâs art and discursive artistic judgments, the tools one didnât use when fishing, and so on. These identity signals were situational, and each chapter draws upon examples of disagreement or doubt over the inclusion or exclusion of certain men as âgentlemenâ to explore instances in which such signals were performed with varying degrees of efficacy.
In my conclusion, I discuss the connection between many of these âgentlemanlyâ identity signals and an emerging form of social snobbery that I call the âdiscourse of âgentlemanlyâ expertise.â In the 7th century and earlier, if the âgentlemanlyâ sort compared themselves to âartisans,â it would almost certainly be based on what they did. However, around the 9thâ13th centuries, the âgentlemanlyâ sort became more actively involved (or vocal about their involvement) in the arts, and started to contrast their own practice and appreciation of these arts more actively with the (ostensibly inferior) practice and appreciation of ânon-gentlemanlyâ sorts. In doing so, they began to define and distinguish themselves not by what they did, but by how they did it. They did not stop with simply articulating âgentlemanlyâ practices as different but equally good; they asserted that their practices and products were superior, claiming expertise in these fields on the basis of their ethical values, cultural norms, aesthetic preferences, and abstract knowledge of the cosmos and the ineffable âWayâ (Dao é). I argue that, ironically, this snobbish discourse of social distinction actually made it increasingly possible for people earning a livelihood in various arts to enact âgentlemanlyâ identities, by associating symbolic capital with the demonstration or depiction of âgentlemanlyâ modes of engagement.
By focusing on the increasing number of ways in which âgentlemanlyâ identities were constructed and performed in 7thâ14th century China, this dissertation offers insight into how individuals and groups made decisions of inclusion or exclusion, offered or obtained access to resources, and developed a sense of self and place in society. In doing so, it enriches our understandings of both the social forces shaping the middle period Chinese social world, and the individuals and groups who inhabited it
Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama
The contributions in this edited volume approach poetry, narrative, and drama from the perspective of Computational Stylistics. They exemplify methods of computational textual analysis and explore the possibility of computational generation of literary texts. The volume presents a range of computational and Natural Language Processing applications to literary studies, such as motif detection, network analysis, machine learning, and deep learning
Sex & Drugs & RockânâRoll A moral Odyssey retold by Homer, Joyce and Duchamp
In 2023, one century after Marcel Duchamp completed his work on the Large Glass, a book comes to suggest that it is not self-referential but has specific protagonists, locations and details that convey a timeless moral lesson about archetypal issues that human nature is perpetually tormented with â Sex (lust) & Drugs (intoxication) & RockânâRoll (violence).
By choice, Duchamp never directly referred to Homer regarding the Glass, and this work has been analysed by many scholars in different ways. When Dr Megakles Rogakos came across the work in 2000, the detail of the Oculist Witnesses on it prompted him to sense their possible connection with the Trial of the Bow in Homerâs Odyssey, and he spoke about it in a related talk at Londonâs Tate Gallery on 10 August of the same year. He made this theory the subject of his PhD thesis (2012-2016) at the University of Essex entitled âA Joycean Exegesis of The Large Glass: Homeric Traces in the Postmodernism of Marcel Duchampâ. The Homeric exegesis of Duchampâs Glass through Joyceâs Ulysses aims to confirm the atavistic theory that the ancient is present in the contemporary. The Glass, like the Homeric Odyssey, as revisited in Ulysses, may be thought to be some kind of moralising treatise on the temptations of man to fall prey to the three deadliest sins throughout human history â lust of flesh; indulgence in drugs; craving for power, as discussed separately in chapters of the book (see III.9; III.8; III.12) and gave its title â âSex & Drugs & RockânâRollâ, after Ian Duryâs censored song of 1977. If its Joycean exegesis is proven, then the Glass may enigmatically emerge as a Homeric paradigm of manâs initiation to inner freedom, which Duchamp called the âbeauty of indifferenceâ. Dr Eleftherios Anevlavis, translator of Joyceâs Ulysses and Wake, writes: âDr Rogakosâ exegesis is an impressive intellectual creation, enriched with the practices of decipherment and the art of writing, but at the same time created by the experiences and exhaustive study of culture from Homer to Yoko Ono and of the cosmos from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the constellation of the Pleiades.â Remarkably, with his theory of the appropriation of Homerâs Odyssey in Duchampâs Glass, Dr Rogakos offers a refreshingly tongue-in-cheek explanation of postmodernismâs relationship to antiquity
'Ane end of an auld song?': macro and micro perspectives on written Scots in correspondence during the union of parliaments debates
This thesis examines the relationship between political identity and variation from a diachronic perspective. Specifically, it explores the use of written Scots features in the personal correspondence of Scottish politicians active during the Union of the Parliaments debates. Written Scots by 1700 had steadily retreated from most text-types in the face of ongoing anglicisation, but simultaneously the Union debates sparked heated discussion around questions of nationality and Scotland's separate identity. I consider the extent to which the use of Scots features may have been influenced by such discourse, but also how they may have become indexical markers used to lay claim to these ideologies. Drawing from the frameworks of First, Second and Third Wave perspectives on variation, and combining quantitative, macro-social methods with micro-social analysis, broad socio-political factors are explored alongside plausible stylistic intentions in conditioning or influencing the linguistic behaviour of these writers. The first analysis examines variation in the corpus temporally, using the chronologically-organised clustering technique VNC - Variability-based Neighbor Clustering (Gries and Hilpert, 2008), to measure Scots features over time. The crucial years of the debates (1700-1707) are compared with correspondence either side, and the VNC analysis identifies heightened use of Scots falling within the key years of the debates. The following macro-social analysis explores the factors driving this variation quantitatively, using a number of different statistical models to examine the data from various perspectives. Probabilities of Scots are found to correlate with certain political factors, though in complex and multilayered ways that reflect the composite nature of the historical figures operating in the Scottish parliament. The third analysis focuses on the features of written Scots itself and how these pattern in aggregate and across the individual authors who comprise the corpus. Findings suggest the persistence of written Scots was not being driven by a singular feature or set of tokens, rather, authors varied widely in their range and proportion of different variants. Finally, the micro-analysis examines the intra-writer variation of four individuals representing different political interests, exploring their Scots use across various recipients. Close-up inspection of features within particular extracts and letters suggests the subtle social and stylistic functions Scots had acquired for these writers. Its occurrence was found to reflect but also constitute the macro-social patterns identified earlier.
Taken together, results indicate the use of Scots features was both influenced by, and contributed to, the political and ideological loyalties these writers harboured. Moreover, they tentatively suggest a process of reinterpretation was underway, in which Scots features were becoming a resource that could be selectively employed for particular indexical and communicative purposes
Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021
The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at UniversitĂ degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022. After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown
Matrix representations, linear transformations, and kernels for disambiguation in natural language
In the application of machine learning methods with natural language inputs, the words and their positions in the input text are some of the most important features. In this article, we introduce a framework based on a word-position matrix representation of text, linear feature transformations of the word-position matrices, and kernel functions constructed from the transformations. We consider two categories of transformations, one based on word similarities and the second on their positions, which can be applied simultaneously in the framework in an elegant way. We show how word and positional similarities obtained by applying previously proposed techniques, such as latent semantic analysis, can be incorporated as transformations in the framework. We also introduce novel ways to determine word and positional similarities. We further present efficient algorithms for computing kernel functions incorporating the transformations on the word-position matrices, and, more importantly, introduce a highly efficient method for prediction. The framework is particularly suitable to natural language disambiguation tasks where the aim is to select for a single word a particular property from a set of candidates based on the context of the word. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework to this type of tasks using context-sensitive spelling error correction on the Reuters News corpus as a model problem
Translating the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia
In Translating the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia Esperanza Alfonso and Javier del Barco offer an edition and comprehensive study of the first Hebrew-vernacular biblical glossary-commentary produced in medieval Iberia that is known to date
Insurance Meets Sentiment: An Empirical Study of Attitudes Toward Life, Health, and P&C Insurances
Sentiment Analysis, an up-and-coming subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), contains previously untapped potential that can be utilized to drive better business decision making. In this paper, we employ state-of-the-art sentiment analysis tools to compare the performances of traditional classification algorithms â namely Support Vector Machines (SVMs), bagging, boosting, random forest, and decision tree classifiers â on insurance-related textual data. We successfully demonstrate that algorithms such as bagging and boosting, which were constructed to enhance the performance of simpler algorithms such as decision tree classifiers, offer only marginal improvements in terms of classification accuracy and certain performance metrics for our data. However, the improved accuracy comes as the cost of slightly higher runtimes. Insurance companies could apply these findings to choose suitable algorithms and gain a more nuanced understanding of the needs of their insureds.
Index Termsâ Sentiment Analysis, Textual Analysis, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Opinion Mining (OM
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