51 research outputs found

    A corpus-based investigation into lexicogrammatical incongruity and its relation to irony

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    Presented is a corpus-based investigation into the lexicogrammatical features of irony. A common understanding of irony is of a trope in which the dictum and the implicatum are seen as incongruous. I argue that patterns of lexicogrammatical incongruity can reflect this incongruity at the pragmatic level. Additionally, a bottom-up examination of authentic examples of ironic utterances can reveal common lexicogrammatical patterns. This study attempts to readdress the paucity of linguistic studies into irony by focusing on real-world examples of irony as a source of data. Examples of irony were taken from two irony-rich discourse environments and ironic examples were extracted using an independent framework of irony. Commonalities of patterning were first identified, and then interrogated across the two DIY corpora, as well as two general corpora, in order to measure both frequency (raw/t-score) and fixedness. Finally, a deeper examination of the concordance lines revealed whether such patterns carry an ironic force. Three significant findings are presented. Firstly, the study explores lexicogrammatical patterns of collocation concerning multiple hedging: that is, two or more lexical items which ostensibly have a hedging function, yet often frame strong evaluative or rhetorical statements. Secondly, I present patterns of collostruction in which the progressive aspect colligates with cognition verbs. It is the lexicogrammatical incongruity within these patterns that is often a source of irony. Usage of these phrases does not, however, guarantee that the statement will always be ironic. Yet, when compared within larger general corpora, these patterns demonstrate high tendencies of pragmatic characteristics related to irony. Therefore, the final results chapter argues that such patterns can be considered as having ironic priming. Identification and awareness of such patterns may help audiences in accurately reaching ironic interpretations. More practically, these patterns may also help NLP methodology by building upon previous attempts of automated irony detection to create more robust algorithms. Furthermore, there are wider implications to what corpus linguistic methodology can explore in regard to connections between pragmatics and lexicogrammar

    Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

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    Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

    Pragmatic borrowing between English and Chinese: A comparative study of two-way exchanges

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    Through centuries of cross-cultural communication, English has been enriched by elements from other languages around the world, including Chinese; meanwhile, English has also exerted considerable influence on the Chinese language. Lexical exchanges between the two languages have been studied in previous research, and yet are mostly restricted to the lexical items themselves. This thesis particularly explores the pragmatic aspect of this language contact, examining items that are used to convey attitudinal or interpersonal meanings. I conduct a series of case studies on bi-directional pragmatic borrowing between English and Chinese, using a variety of data sources, which include dictionaries, corpora, social media data, and other online resources. I take a broad view of what constitutes pragmatic borrowing: I not only investigate the borrowing and integration of discourse-pragmatic items that are transferred between the two languages, but also examine the pragmatic motivations for the borrowing of other lexical items and even grammatical units. The items discussed in the thesis range from parts of words, specifically affixes, to individual words to longer structures, and contextual analysis shows that all of these have been used to achieve pragmatic effects. The study demonstrates the important role of cultural context, speaker creativity, and sociolinguistic factors in the borrowing, integration, and innovative use of linguistic items

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

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    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

    Syntax of Hungarian

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    These books aim to present a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of the Hungarian language, rooted in theory but providing highly detailed descriptions, and intended to be of use to researchers, as well as advanced students of language and linguistics. As research in language leads to extensive changes in our understanding and representations of grammar, the Comprehensive Grammar Resources series intends to present the most current understanding of grammar and syntax as completely as possible in a way that will both speak to modern linguists and serve as a resource for the non-specialist

    Angewandte Linguistik – Neue Herausforderungen und Konzepte (Edition 1)

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    In 24 theoretischen und praxisbezogenen Beiträgen nähern sich Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus Deutschland, Österreich und Polen den aktuellen Problemen aus dem weit verstandenen Gebiet der angewandten Linguistik an. Die Beiträge stammen aus den folgenden thematischen Gebieten: Pragma- und Soziolinguistikstudien, kontrastive Studien, Interkulturalität, Spracherwerbs- und Sprachlehrforschung, Fachsprachen, Übersetzen und Dolmetschen sowie Lingustic Landscapes. Der vorliegende Band greift damit die vielseitigen Forschungsinteressen von Prof. Dr. habil. Izabela Prokop auf, die im Jahr 2021 ihr 70. Lebensjahr vollendet. The present book is a collection of 24 theoretical and empirical contributions which approach current problems within a widely understood field of applied linguistics. Their authors come from Germany, Austria and Poland and represent major academic institutions in these countries. The chapters included in the monograph treat about the most recent issues in the field and are organized into seven thematic foci: Pragma- and sociolinguistics, contrastive studies, interculturality, language acquisition and language teaching research, specialised languages, translation and translation studies, and research in linguistic landscape. The incentive for putting this monograph together is the 70th birthday of prof. Izabela Prokop

    An Unsolicited Soliloquy on Dependency Parsing

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    Programa Oficial de Doutoramento en Computación . 5009V01[Abstract] This thesis presents work on dependency parsing covering two distinct lines of research. The first aims to develop efficient parsers so that they can be fast enough to parse large amounts of data while still maintaining decent accuracy. We investigate two techniques to achieve this. The first is a cognitively-inspired method and the second uses a model distillation method. The first technique proved to be utterly dismal, while the second was somewhat of a success. The second line of research presented in this thesis evaluates parsers. This is also done in two ways. We aim to evaluate what causes variation in parsing performance for different algorithms and also different treebanks. This evaluation is grounded in dependency displacements (the directed distance between a dependent and its head) and the subsequent distributions associated with algorithms and the distributions found in treebanks. This work sheds some light on the variation in performance for both different algorithms and different treebanks. And the second part of this area focuses on the utility of part-of-speech tags when used with parsing systems and questions the standard position of assuming that they might help but they certainly won’t hurt.[Resumen] Esta tesis presenta trabajo sobre análisis de dependencias que cubre dos líneas de investigación distintas. La primera tiene como objetivo desarrollar analizadores eficientes, de modo que sean suficientemente rápidos como para analizar grandes volúmenes de datos y, al mismo tiempo, sean suficientemente precisos. Investigamos dos métodos. El primero se basa en teorías cognitivas y el segundo usa una técnica de destilación. La primera técnica resultó un enorme fracaso, mientras que la segunda fue en cierto modo un ´éxito. La otra línea evalúa los analizadores sintácticos. Esto también se hace de dos maneras. Evaluamos la causa de la variación en el rendimiento de los analizadores para distintos algoritmos y corpus. Esta evaluación utiliza la diferencia entre las distribuciones del desplazamiento de arista (la distancia dirigida de las aristas) correspondientes a cada algoritmo y corpus. También evalúa la diferencia entre las distribuciones del desplazamiento de arista en los datos de entrenamiento y prueba. Este trabajo esclarece las variaciones en el rendimiento para algoritmos y corpus diferentes. La segunda parte de esta línea investiga la utilidad de las etiquetas gramaticales para los analizadores sintácticos.[Resumo] Esta tese presenta traballo sobre análise sintáctica, cubrindo dúas liñas de investigación. A primeira aspira a desenvolver analizadores eficientes, de maneira que sexan suficientemente rápidos para procesar grandes volumes de datos e á vez sexan precisos. Investigamos dous métodos. O primeiro baséase nunha teoría cognitiva, e o segundo usa unha técnica de destilación. O primeiro método foi un enorme fracaso, mentres que o segundo foi en certo modo un éxito. A outra liña avalúa os analizadores sintácticos. Esto tamén se fai de dúas maneiras. Avaliamos a causa da variación no rendemento dos analizadores para distintos algoritmos e corpus. Esta avaliaci´on usa a diferencia entre as distribucións do desprazamento de arista (a distancia dirixida das aristas) correspondentes aos algoritmos e aos corpus. Tamén avalía a diferencia entre as distribucións do desprazamento de arista nos datos de adestramento e proba. Este traballo esclarece as variacións no rendemento para algoritmos e corpus diferentes. A segunda parte desta liña investiga a utilidade das etiquetas gramaticais para os analizadores sintácticos.This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (FASTPARSE, grant agreement No 714150) and from the Centro de Investigación de Galicia (CITIC) which is funded by the Xunta de Galicia and the European Union (ERDF - Galicia 2014-2020 Program) by grant ED431G 2019/01.Xunta de Galicia; ED431G 2019/0

    “Russians are very sweet and nice”:a corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis of the representation of people in online travel reviews about Moscow

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    The paper explores how guests and hosts are represented in online travel reviews about Moscow. Tourism provides an opportunity to get acquainted with the sociocultural background of other nations and potentially to improve international relations. Moscow, the capital of Russia, is sometimes viewed as an unfriendly or unsafe destination and the Russian Government aims to increase the popularity of the city. However, there are concerns that modern tourism discourse contributes to the maintenance of asymmetrical guest-host power relations. Guests are often accused of consumerism while hosts are frequently backgrounded or represented as servants or cultural markers. Such representation can lead to client-servant attitude and even cause discrimination against hosts. While online travel reviews are considered an important genre of tourism discourse, most studies analyse the representation of people in promotional or media discourse. Considering that multimodality is an integral feature of tourism discourse and that the analysis of discourse patterns allows exploring the meanings widely shared by the society, the study utilizes a corpus-assisted multimodal approach by analysing the representation of people in headlines, texts, images and image captions of a corpus of online travel reviews. The analysis corroborates previous conclusions that guests tend to be represented as consumers enjoying themselves while hosts are perceived as friendly servants. However, the study provides evidence that tourists can background not only hosts but also themselves or other tourists. Moreover, the results reveal that in contrast to promotional and media discourse, guests can also portray themselves as active, solving problems while sometimes representing guests as rude or unwelcoming. The results also show that the representation of people can vary across the modes of the same document. The study concludes that user-generated tourism discourse reveals a complex picture and can express resistance to the dominant institutional imagery

    European Approaches to Japanese Language and Linguistics

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    In this volume European specialists of Japanese language present new and original research into Japanese over a wide spectrum of topics which include descriptive, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and didactic accounts. The articles share a focus on contemporary issues and adopt new approaches to the study of Japanese that often are specific to European traditions of language study. The articles address an audience that includes both Japanese Studies and Linguistics. They are representative of the wide range of topics that are currently studied in European universities, and they address scholars and students alike
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