2,125 research outputs found
UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024
The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp
UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023
The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp
Perspective Chapter – Developing a Semiotic Awareness of Argumentation in Academic Writing for Studies in Higher Education
The importance of argumentation in academic writing, while recognised historically, has arguably lost prominence alongside the rapid expansion of higher education since the early 1990s in the UK. This has been exacerbated by an increasingly prevalent technological intervention in teaching and learning processes. With this as a background, this chapter presents a discourse analysis of dissertation extracts to articulate the role of intertextuality in governing interpretative, evaluative, and concluding propositions in argumentation. Each proposition is examined as indexed to syntactical compositionality by which a previous proposition elicits a present one that awaits a future one, thus forming an argument. The analysis teases out what is at stake concerning the interdependence of signifying codes in textual relations and functions. It brings to the fore the notion of instances of signification that lends itself as a mediational apparatus to what counts as the intertextuality of argumentation – particularly why intertextuality matters in justifying a claim by giving logical reasons rather than wading into mere description or verging on textual turbulence. The chapter concludes by adding to long-standing debates on critical thinking in higher education a quest for a semiotic awareness of argumentation, highlighting the intertextuality of argumentation as facilitating rational deliberation for critical thinking in academic writing
The Role of Preprocessing for Word Representation Learning in Affective Tasks
Affective tasks, including sentiment analysis, emotion classification, and sarcasm detection have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to a broad range of useful applications in various domains. The main goal of affect detection tasks is to recognize states such as mood, sentiment, and emotions from textual data (e.g., news articles or product reviews). Despite the importance of utilizing preprocessing steps in different stages (i.e., word representation learning and building a classification model) of affect detection tasks, this topic has not been studied well. To that end, we explore whether applying various preprocessing methods (stemming, lemmatization, stopword removal, punctuation removal and so on) and their combinations in different stages of the affect detection pipeline can improve the model performance. The are many preprocessing approaches that can be utilized in affect detection tasks. However, their influence on the final performance depends on the type of preprocessing and the stages that they are applied. Moreover, the preprocessing impacts vary across different affective tasks. Our analysis provides thorough insights into how preprocessing steps can be applied in building an effect detection pipeline and their respective influence on performance
Comparing the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence
This pilot study investigates the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence over proficiency levels of a spoken learner corpus. The results show that the formula
in beginner production data is likely being recalled holistically from learners’ phonological
memory rather than generated online, identifiable by virtue of its fluent production in absence
of any other surface structure evidence of the formula’s syntactic properties. As learners’ L2
competence increases, the formula becomes sensitive to modifications which show structural
conformity at each proficiency level. The transparency between the formula’s modification
and learners’ corresponding L2 surface structure realisations suggest that it is the independent
development of L2 competence which integrates the formula into compositional language,
and ultimately drives the SLA process forward
The Epistemic Value of Resonance: Intuitive Thinking in Theoretical Understanding
We commonly say that an explanation for something we do not quite understand ‘resonates’. And we seem to take the resonance of the explanation to count epistemically in its favor. What is resonance and what is its epistemic value? I propose that resonance is a psychological state in which a consciously considered explanation coheres with the unconscious representational content in the mind of an individual, and that this psychological state is metacognitively signaled by a feeling which we also call ‘resonance’. This account of resonance implies that theoretical understanding, rather than knowledge, is the epistemic domain of its functioning. That is, when an explanation resonates, the usual case is that a consciously considered explanatory framework coheres with a rich, unconscious representational nexus associated with the object purportedly explained.
I pursue the question of the value of resonance by developing the features of theoretical understanding. Theoretical understanding of an object, I take it, is when an individual grasps an accurate explanatory framework for that object. Hence, understanding is normed by both accuracy and grasping. Accuracy, however, is secured through warrant. Resonance, I argue, can increase one’s warrant, but not very much. Grasping, on the other hand, is a stop-and-go process of integrating explanations and representational content in long-term memory. Resonance, I argue, improves grasping by ensuring coherence and motivating persistence. Further, resonance seems to be practically necessary to theoretical understanding, insofar as understanding aims toward an aspirational mastery. Resonance enables us to invest cognitive resources in explanatory frameworks we do not yet understand and it prevents us from becoming rigidly attached to a familiar but failing explanatory framework.
I conclude by addressing three worries about the epistemic value of resonance: (1) that the feeling of resonance cannot be distinguished from similar, non-epistemic feelings, (2) that the pleasantness of this feeling conflicts with the accuracy norm for understanding, and (3) that an explanatory framework might resonate with false unconscious beliefs, thus inhibiting accuracy in one’s understanding. Of these, the last is the most worrisome and suggests that attuning to resonance is only one part of a virtuous epistemic life
How as a Signal of an Invariant Meaning
This dissertation aims to explain why speakers and writers use how in the communicative contexts in which they do, and its central claim is that how is a signal of one invariant meaning. The form’s diverse communicative contributions can be explained by hypothesizing a single meaning that contributes to different message effects, or contextual interpretations, on different occasions of its use.
The present analysis rests on the crucial distinction in Columbia School (CS) linguistics, the theoretical framework guiding this project, between meaning and message. A meaning is a signal’s invariant semantic contribution, while messages are the context-unique interpretations that stem from, but are underdetermined by, linguistic utterances (Diver, 1975/2012; Huffman, 2001; Stern, 2019, among many others). How contributes to overlapping messages including — though not limited to — degree, characterization/assessment, personal perspective, and manner, but its invariant semantic contribution is a great deal more abstract than any of these things. How’s hypothesized meaning draws on the CS constructs of both substance and value (Diver, 1995/2012; Davis, 2004). Its substance pertains to Elaboration – it signals that additional, elaborating information is pertinent to some aspect of the ongoing discourse. Elaborating information may in principle be relevant in any communicative context, but how explicitly signals that this is so. How’s value (its contrast with other forms) is seen in its membership in the grammatical system of Elaboration, constituted by what are traditionally termed the wh-words (who, what, which, where, when, why and how). Thus, while the other wh-words signal the Relevance of Elaboration with respect to something comparatively specific — a PERSON, ENTITY, LOCATION, TIME, REASON — how signals the Relevance of unspecified Elaboration, or Elaboration (OTHER). In Diverian terms, how is the residual member of its semantic domain (Diver 1978/2012, 1995/2012). It opens the deictic field to its widest setting, signaling that Elaboration in the broadest possible sense is Relevant. It is how’s role as a residual member of a grammatical system that accounts for the widely diverse and heterogeneous message effects that follow from its use. These may involve persons, entities, locations, etc., but the Relevant Elaboration signaled by how never centers on, and is thus never reducible to, any one of these things.
Evidence in favor of this analysis includes both qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative data spans several sources, including two full length books; quantitative data from a large corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008- ), shows that how is more likely to co-occur with other forms that suggest the relevance of Elaboration as part of the communication.
The analysis offered in this dissertation more successfully accounts for how’s distribution than the many categories identified in traditional grammars, and more successfully than the three categories posited in generative syntax — manner adverb, degree adverb and complementizer/conjunction (Willis, 2007; van Gelderen, 2013, 2015). These constructs prove to be analytically unreliable, in that they overlap significantly and exhibit a considerable degree of indeterminacy. They are also descriptively inadequate, in that some attested occurrences of how cannot be accounted for by any of them.
In contrast, the present analysis takes a fresh perspective. Freed from the limitations of sentence-based, traditional categories and based on careful review of attested data, we have discovered that how is a signal with a meaning. The form’s heterogeneous message-effects follow from the invariant meaning proposed here, Elaboration (OTHER) is Relevant — a meaning which is utilized by speakers and writers in pursuit of their communicative goals
On marked declaratives, exclamatives, and discourse particles in Castilian Spanish
This book provides a new perspective on prosodically marked declaratives, wh-exclamatives, and discourse particles in the Madrid variety of Spanish. It argues that some marked forms differ from unmarked forms in that they encode modal evaluations of the at-issue meaning. Two epistemic evaluations that can be shown to be encoded by intonation in Spanish are linguistically encoded surprise, or mirativity, and obviousness. An empirical investigation via an audio-enhanced production experiment finds that mirativity and obviousness are associated with distinct intonational features under constant focus scope, with stances of (dis)agreement showing an impact on obvious declaratives. Wh-exclamatives are found not to differ significantly in intonational marking from neutral declaratives, showing that they need not be miratives. Moreover, we find that intonational marking on different discourse particles in natural dialogue correlates with their meaning contribution without being fully determined by it. In part, these findings quantitatively confirm previous qualitative findings on the meaning of intonational configurations in Madrid Spanish. But they also add new insights on the role intonation plays in the negotiation of commitments and expectations between interlocutors
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