Punctuation in Quoted Speech

Quoted speech is often set off by punctuation marks, in particular quotation marks. Thus, it might seem that the quotation marks would be extremely useful in identifying these structures in texts. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite so clear. In this work, I will argue that quotation marks are not adequate for either identifying or constraining the syntax of quoted speech. More useful information comes from the presence of a quoting verb, which is either a verb of saying or a punctual verb, and the presence of other punctuation marks, usually commas. Using a lexicalized grammar, we can license most quoting clauses as text adjuncts. A distinction will be made not between direct and indirect quoted speech, but rather between adjunct and non-adjunct quoting clauses.Comment: 11 pages, 11 ps figures, Proceedings of SIGPARSE 96 - Punctuation in Computational Linguistic

Unity in the Variety of Quotation

This chapter argues that while quotation marks are polysemous, the thread that runs through all uses of quotation marks that involve reference to expressions is pure quotation, in which an expression formed by enclosing another expression in quotation marks refers to that enclosed expression. We defend a version of the so-called disquotational theory of pure quotation and show how this device is used in direct discourse and attitude attributions, in exposition in scholarly contexts, and in so-called mixed quotation in indirect discourse and attitude attributions. We argue that uses of quotation marks that extend beyond pure quotation have two features in common. First, the expressions appearing in quotation marks are intended to be understood, and that they are intended to be understood is essential to the function that such quotations play in communication, though this does not always involve the expressions contributing their extensional properties to fixing truth conditions for the sentences in which they appear. Second, they appeal to a relation to the expression appearing in quotation marks that plays a role in determining the truth conditions of the sentences in which they appear

Attitudes and emotions through written text: The case of textual deformation in Internet chat rooms

Spanish Internet chat rooms are visited by a lot of young people who use language in a very creative way (e.g. repetition of letters and punctuation marks). In this paper, several hypotheses concerning the uses of textual deformation assess their communicative usefulness. The goal of these hypotheses is to check whether these deformations favour a more accurate identification and evaluation of the senders’ underlying attitudes (propositional or affective) and emotions. The answers to a questionnaire indicate that despite the supplementary level of information that textual deformation provides, readers tend not to agree on the exact quality of the sender’s underlying attitudes and emotions, nor do they tend to establish degrees of intensity related to the quantity of text typed. However, and despite this evidence, textual deformation seems to play a part in the eventual quality of chat users’ interpretations of the messages sent to chat rooms.Los chats españoles de Internet son visitados por muchos jóvenes que usan el lenguaje de una forma muy creativa (ej. repetición de letras y signos de puntuación). En este artículo se evalúan varias hipótesis sobre el uso de la deformación textual respecto a su eficacia comunicativa. Se trata de comprobar si estas deformaciones favorecen una identificación y evaluación más adecuada de las actitudes (proposicionales o afectivas) y emociones de sus autores. Las respuestas a un cuestionario revelan que a pesar de la información adicional que la deformación textual aporta, los lectores no suelen coincidir en la cualidad exacta de estas actitudes y emociones, ni establecen grados de intensidad relacionados con la cantidad de texto tecleada. Sin embargo, y a pesar de estos resultados, la deformación textual parece jugar un papel en la interpretación que finalmente se elige de estos mensajes enviados a los chats.The research for this paper has been supported by IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas)

Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically

In this article we describe the emerging area of text classification research focused on the problem of collaborative learning process analysis both from a broad perspective and more specifically in terms of a publicly available tool set called TagHelper tools. Analyzing the variety of pedagogically valuable facets of learners’ interactions is a time consuming and effortful process. Improving automated analyses of such highly valued processes of collaborative learning by adapting and applying recent text classification technologies would make it a less arduous task to obtain insights from corpus data. This endeavor also holds the potential for enabling substantially improved on-line instruction both by providing teachers and facilitators with reports about the groups they are moderating and by triggering context sensitive collaborative learning support on an as-needed basis. In this article, we report on an interdisciplinary research project, which has been investigating the effectiveness of applying text classification technology to a large CSCL corpus that has been analyzed by human coders using a theory-based multidimensional coding scheme. We report promising results and include an in-depth discussion of important issues such as reliability, validity, and efficiency that should be considered when deciding on the appropriateness of adopting a new technology such as TagHelper tools. One major technical contribution of this work is a demonstration that an important piece of the work towards making text classification technology effective for this purpose is designing and building linguistic pattern detectors, otherwise known as features, that can be extracted reliably from texts and that have high predictive power for the categories of discourse actions that the CSCL community is interested in

From secreit script to public print: punctuation, news management and the condemnation of the Earl of Bothwell

The fall from power of James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, in 1567 was as dramatic as it was sudden. The survival of documents associated with the event gives us a rare insight into the ways in which texts were adapted for different purposes and readerships. Initially recorded in the manuscript Register of the Acts of the Privy Council of Scotland, versions of these documents subsequently appeared as printed broadsheets for public display in prominent places such as Edinburgh’s Tolbooth next to the kirk of St Giles. They are the first Scottish documents of their kind known to have undergone this process of transition from script to print, and from the comparative privacy of the Privy Council’s Register to the public domain. Whereas the Register was an aide memoire for council use, the printed texts were public, performative acts. As these texts passed from one medium to another, their form and punctuation were changed, mirroring the changing function for which they were repurposed. In this essay, the differences in appearance between these two kinds of text will be shown to align quite precisely with the changing uses of literacy in early modern Scotland

A chart of certain skills in written communication for grades seven to twelve

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Social class, language and power ‘Letter to a teacher’ : Lorenzo Milani and the school of Barbiana

The link between language and power and the indispensible and urgent need for the oppressed to master the dominant language for emancipatory purposes are among the recurrent themes of Lettera a una professoressa. Developing communicative abilities and learning the ‘art’ of writing are seen by the authors of the Lettera as instruments of empowerment and means to resist the dominant location of hegemonic groups who reproduce their power through an education process that self-serves the interests of the most powerful. One of the main notions expressed constantly throughout the Lettera is that each and every child can learn how to reflect on his/her use of different languages, including the mother tongue, and that all learning experiences in life are valuable, regardless of one’s socioeconomic status. However, when children with different backgrounds start attending school they go through different experiences, even because of the form of language used by teachers: in some cases this may be a natural transition from what they are exposed to at home, even in their pre-school years; in other cases the language of schooling is totally different, the language register may be more formal and the variety used may approach standard forms which contrast with local or regional varieties used at home. The language of schooling may therefore represent one of the first obstacles towards the socialisation and integration of some pupils.peer-reviewe

Incorporating Punctuation Into the Sentence Grammar: A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar Perspective

Punctuation helps us to structure, and thus to understand, texts. Many uses of punctuation straddle the line between syntax and discourse, because they serve to combine multiple propositions within a single orthographic sentence. They allow us to insert discourse-level relations at the level of a single sentence. Just as people make use of information from punctuation in processing what they read, computers can use information from punctuation in processing texts automatically. Most current natural language processing systems fail to take punctuation into account at all, losing a valuable source of information about the text. Those which do mostly do so in a superficial way, again failing to fully exploit the information conveyed by punctuation. To be able to make use of such information in a computational system, we must first characterize its uses and find a suitable representation for encoding them. The work here focuses on extending a syntactic grammar to handle phenomena occurring within a single sentence which have punctuation as an integral component. Punctuation marks are treated as full-fledged lexical items in a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar, which is an extremely well-suited formalism for encoding punctuation in the sentence grammar. Each mark anchors its own elementary trees and imposes constraints on the surrounding lexical items. I have analyzed data representing a wide variety of constructions, and added treatments of them to the large English grammar which is part of the XTAG system. The advantages of using LTAG are that its elementary units are structured trees of a suitable size for stating the constraints we are interested in, and the derivation histories it produces contain information the discourse grammar will need about which elementary units have used and how they have been combined. I also consider in detail a few particularly interesting constructions where the sentence and discourse grammars meet-appositives, reported speech and uses of parentheses. My results confirm that punctuation can be used in analyzing sentences to increase the coverage of the grammar, reduce the ambiguity of certain word sequences and facilitate discourse-level processing of the texts