Writing Sumerian, Creating Texts: Reflections on Text-building Practices in Old Babylonian Schools

Sumerian lexical and literary compositions both emerged from the same social sphere, namely scribal education. The complexities of inter-compositional dependence in these two corpora have not been thoroughly explored, particularly as relevant to questions of text-building during the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800–1600 bce). Copying practices evident in lexical texts indicate that students and scholars adopted various methods of replication, including visual copying, copying from memory, and ad hoc innovation. They were not confined to reproducing a received text. Such practices extend to copying literary compositions. A study of compositions from Advanced Lexical Education in comparison with several literary compositions shows a complex inter-dialectic between the corpora, in which lexical compositions demonstrate dependence on literary compositions and vice versa. Thus, Old Babylonian students and scholars could experiment with multiple text-building practices, drawing on their knowledge of the lexical and the literary, regularly creating new versions of familiar compositions

What Level of Quality can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text?

Given the rise of a new approach to MT, Neural MT (NMT), and its promising performance on different text types, we assess the translation quality it can attain on what is perceived to be the greatest challenge for MT: literary text. Specifically, we target novels, arguably the most popular type of literary text. We build a literary-adapted NMT system for the English-to-Catalan translation direction and evaluate it against a system pertaining to the previous dominant paradigm in MT: statistical phrase-based MT (PBSMT). To this end, for the first time we train MT systems, both NMT and PBSMT, on large amounts of literary text (over 100 million words) and evaluate them on a set of twelve widely known novels spanning from the the 1920s to the present day. According to the BLEU automatic evaluation metric, NMT is significantly better than PBSMT (p < 0.01) on all the novels considered. Overall, NMT results in a 11% relative improvement (3 points absolute) over PBSMT. A complementary human evaluation on three of the books shows that between 17% and 34% of the translations, depending on the book, produced by NMT (versus 8% and 20% with PBSMT) are perceived by native speakers of the target language to be of equivalent quality to translations produced by a professional human translator.Comment: Chapter for the forthcoming book "Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice" (Springer

A comprehensive program for textual concordances and statistics

Literary research tool can provide concordance and many other textual statistics relating to authorship or sequence of composition. Mechanical text manipulation provides wide variety of text formats and conventions (such as upper case). This program is written in FORTRAN H for use on IBM-360 computer

A Data-Oriented Model of Literary Language

We consider the task of predicting how literary a text is, with a gold standard from human ratings. Aside from a standard bigram baseline, we apply rich syntactic tree fragments, mined from the training set, and a series of hand-picked features. Our model is the first to distinguish degrees of highly and less literary novels using a variety of lexical and syntactic features, and explains 76.0 % of the variation in literary ratings.Comment: To be published in EACL 2017, 11 page

Multilingualism and Formulations of Scholarship: The Rosen Vocabulary

The Rosen Vocabulary is an Old Babylonian bilingual text. Through an edition of this text, I argue that the ad-hoc mixed vocabularies known from the Old Babylonian period feature citations or allusions to literary compositions as well as subsequent analogous expressions, both in Sumerian and in Akkadian

The Author’s Modality and Sctratificational Structure of a Literary Text in Modern English

Any literary text irrespective of its genre or trend represents a unique and aesthetic image of the world, created by the author according to his communicative intention and his subjective modality. Hence, the subjective is the organizing axis of a literary work, for, in expressing his vision of the world, the author represents reality in the way that he considers to be most fitting. The interaction and co-existence of subjective and objective factors find their realization in the stratificational structure of the text, i.e. in its multi-layered constitution. The interdisciplinary methodology of research, employed in the article involves some essential data of the theory of literature, linguo-stylistics, text interpretation and linguo-pragmatics.

Trandformations of a Text (A Literary Puzzle)

This mysterious document, entitled Text B, was found among the literary remains of a famous author. It should not be confused with Minoan B, which represents an entirely different rubric

Comparing Literary and Non-literary Texts Through Critical Reading Approach on Reading Comprehension

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk (1) menginvestigasi apakah ada perbedaan pemahaman siswa yang diajar menggunakan teks literary dan non-literary melalui pendekatan membaca critis. (2) menemukan teks manakah yang paling effektif untuk memahami bacaan. Untuk mencapai tujuan ini, peneliti menggunakan studi kuantitatif. Dua kelas dijadikan sampel, yaitu kelas experimen satu menggunakan teks literary dan kelas experimen dua menggunakan teks non-literary. Terdapat dua instrument, yaitu tes reading dan interview. Hasil dari analisis data menunjukan bahwa terdapat perbedaan tingkat pemahaman siswa yang diajar menggunakan teks literary dan non-literary melalui pendekatan membaca kritis. kemudian, teks literary lebih effektif dari non-literary untuk memahami bacaan. Hasil tes hipotesis menunjukan bahwa T-hitung lebih tinggi dari T-tabel (4.402 > 2.002). Jadi disimpulkan bahwa H0 ditolak dan menunjukan bahwa teks literary lebih baik dari non-literary untuk meningkatkan membaca kritis siswa. This study aimed at (1) investigating whether there is a significant difference between the students' reading comprehension achievement using literary text and non-literary text through critical reading approach. (2) finding which of the two materials that is more effective in reading comprehension. To achieve this goal, the researcher carried out quantitative study. Two classes have been taken: experimental class one using literary text and experimental class two using non-literary text. There were two instruments used in this research: reading test and interview. The results of data analysis showed there was a significant difference of between the students' reading achievement taught by literary text and those taught by non-literary text through critical reading approach. Then, literary text was more effective than non-literary text. Hypothesis test showed that T-value was higher than T-table (4.402 > 2,002). It can be concluded null-hypothesis is rejected. It can be inferred that literary text is better than non-literary text for encouraging students' critical reading

Linguistics in the Study and Teaching of Literature

Literary texts include linguistic form, as well as specialized literary forms (some of which also involve language). Linguistics can offer to literary studies an understanding of these kinds of form, and the ways by which a text is used to communicate meaning. In order to cope with the great variety of creative uses of language in literature, linguistics must acknowledge that some texts are assigned structure by non-linguistic means, but the boundaries between linguistic and non-linguistic explanations for literary language are not clearly drawn. The article concludes with discussion of what kinds and level of linguistics might usefully be taught in a literature classroom, and offers practical suggestions for the application of linguistics to literature teaching

Teaching geography with literary mapping: A didactic experiment

The relationship between maps and literature has long been debated from both narrative and geographical perspectives. At the core of this contribution are so-called reader generated mappings, mapping practices performed after the reading of a literary text. The aim of this article is to suggest possible didactic directions for teaching geography through geo-visualisations based on the reading of literary texts. In particular, this research draws from the results of a literary mapping workshop attended by students during an introductory human geography course at the University of Padua (Italy). Focusing on one of the literary mappings performed by the students, namely the mapping of a short story written by the Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, a deductive process is used to understand the possible future potentialities of literary mapping in didactics. Analysing the students\u2019 literary maps, this article aims to direct attention to literary mapping practices as constellations of learning moments to exploit. The reading of the text, the envisioning and creation of the map are here explored as the steps of a complex practice capable of visually developing geographical knowledge