RATFOR user's guide version 2.0

This document is a user's guide for RATFOR at Ames Research Center. The main part of the document is a general description of RATFOR, and the appendix is devoted to a machine specific implementation for the Cray X-MP. The general stylistic features of RATFOR are discussed, including the block structure, keywords, source code, format, and the notion of tokens. There is a section on the basic control structures (IF-ELSE, ELSE IF, WHILE, FOR, DO, REPEAT-UNTIL, BREAK, NEXT), and there is a section on the statements that extend FORTRAN's capabilities (DEFINE, MACRO, INCLUDE, STRING). THE appendix discusses everything needed to compile and run a basic job, the preprocessor options, the supported character sets, the generated listings, fatal errors, and program limitations and the differences from standard FORTRAN

On topics today

This article surveys the state of so-called topic theory today. It charts its development through two generations of topic theorists. The first is constructed around three influential texts: Leonard Ratners seminal book that established the discipline in its own right, Classic music: expression, form and style (1980); Wye Allanbrooks. Rhythmic gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (1983); and Kofi Agawus. Playing with signs: a semiotic interpretation of classical music (1991). The second comprises significant advances in topic theory essayed through two further pairs of texts: Robert Hattens Musical meaning in Beethoven: markedness, correlation, and interpretation (1994) and Interpreting musical gestures, topics, and tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (2004); and Raymond Monelles Linguistics and semiotics in music (1992) and The sense of music: semiotic essays (2000). Topic Theory's role as the soft hermeneutic sub-field of music semiotics (relative to the harder, formalist practices of Nattiezs neutral level analysis) is portrayed here as navigating a number of treacherous polemical paths. These wend their way between referential style (expression) and structural syntax (form); historical reconstruction and hermeneutic construction; and heightened sensitivity to social meanings and imposed acts of creative interpretation. This existence of topic theory in a continuous dialogue between structural formalism and the semantics of expressive discourse is held responsible for its marginal position both to the dominant strains of contemporary postmodern musicology and to the dying embers of formalist analysis. The failure of topic theory to strike a fashionable text-context balance thus highlights why musicology continues to view semiotics with scepticism. Ratner presents his thesaurus of style labelssomewhat dubiouslyas the historically authentic ready-to-hand materials (types and styles) of eighteenth-century expressive musical rhetoric. But it is Agawus combination of this universe of topics with a Schenker-influenced beginning-middle-end paradigm that establishes the hallmark of first generation topic theory on which the first half of this paper focuses. Agawus delicate equation between extroversive and introversive semiosis is essayed as a pivotal turning point in topic theorys ability to transcend the mere passive ascription of rhetorical labels. Out of this equation, expressive meanings can ariseas much from the non-congruence, as the congruence, of signs and structure. Hatten's critique of Agawu for neglecting the full interpretative consequences of his signifieds is the springboard for his more hermeneutically replete brand of topic theory and the emergence of the second generation topic theorists. Hattens use of troping (a kind of musical metaphor), is one of many interpretative tools that are responsible for broadening the arena of topic theorysome of his others being: expressive genres, emergent meanings and markedness theory. These are deployed across a variety of musical parameters as Hattens attention increasingly turns to the prototypicality of topics in their euphoric and dysphoric states. Hattens interpretative work is shown to transcend historical reconstruction to comprise creative interpretation built on a much broader definition of expressive gestures, of which topics are only a constituent part. The article concludes with Monelles expos of the dubious historical underpinnings of Ratners topic theory foundations. This does not render this vibrant branch of semiotics redundant but, on the contrary, charts its future direction as one calling out for far deeper historical investigation and cultural criticism. Monelles enlightening forays into the more replete expressive meanings of such topics as the horse and pianto make this point abundantly clear. The future of topics today, if not musicology in general, is one of cultural criticism

A Stylistic Analysis of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s Update on Ghana’s Enhanced Response to Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper analyzes President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s speech update on Ghana’s enhanced response to Covid-19 pandemic through a stylistic framework. The paper adopts a qualitative method with the aim of finding out the linguistic features ingrained in the speaker’s speech and its effect on the speech to the audience. The study reveals that the selected speech embodies a bevy of (these) linguistic elements: Graphology, syntactic features (multiple sentence, complex sentence, compound sentence), phrases, pronouns, modal verbs, coordinating conjunction and literary devices - repetition, parallel structures and simile. Consequently, the study reveals that the linguistic tools launched in the speaker’s speech help him to carry out his intention to the audience; and as well enables him to win a score of admiration from the audience during the era of COVID-19. The findings of this study have implication on formal stylistics. Thus, it contributes to knowledge on stylistic analysis of presidential speeches in Ghana and by extension, Africa. Keywords: Covid-19, language, speech, Stylistics. DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/97-01 Publication date:March 31st 202

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Creative and Stylistic Devices Employed by Children During a Storybook Narrative Task: A Cross-Cultural Study

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of culture on the creative and stylistic features children employ when producing narratives based on wordless picture books. Method: Participants included 60 first- and second-grade African American, Latino American, and Caucasian children. A subset of narratives based on wordless picture books collected as part of a larger study was coded and analyzed for the following creative and stylistic conventions: organizational style (topic centered, linear, cyclical), dialogue (direct, indirect), reference to character relationships (nature, naming, conduct), embellishment (fantasy, suspense, conflict), and paralinguistic devices (expressive sounds, exclamatory utterances). Results: Many similarities and differences between ethnic groups were found. No significant differences were found between ethnic groups in organizational style or use of paralinguistic devices. African American children included more fantasy in their stories, Latino children named their characters more often, and Caucasian children made more references to the nature of character relationships. Conclusion: Even within the context of a highly structured narrative task based on wordless picture books, culture influences children’s production of narratives. Enhanced understanding of narrative structure, creativity, and style is necessary to provide ecologically valid narrative assessment and intervention for children from diverse cultural backgrounds

Corpus Stylistics and Henry James’s Syntax

The starting point of this dissertation is a methodological question: how can corpus stylistics be used to analyse the syntax of literary fiction? A comparison of the syntax of Henry James’s late style in The Golden Bowl (1904) and his early style in Washington Square (1881) was used as a case study. While James’s late style is very widely discussed by literary critics and often seen as ‘difficult’, there has been very little evidence offered to substantiate this description. Within the extensive field of Henry James studies, there have been few linguistic descriptions of James’s prose. To remedy this, I compiled The Henry James Parsed Corpus (HJPC) from five chapters from each of the two novels. My analysis of the corpus showed that The Golden Bowl is more syntactically complex than Washington Square in a number of ways but only in sentences which do not contain direct speech. James’s idiosyncratic use of parenthesis was defined precisely using syntactic criteria and named delay. The Golden Bowl has more delay than Washington Square but also only in non-speech sentences. Only a small number of sentences have very high numbers of dependent clauses and/or delay. I argue that these exceptional sentences create the impression that the later text is homogeneously difficult. My research shows that this impression is deceptive; in fact the overwhelming majority of sentences in The Golden Bowl are no more syntactically complex than those of Washington Square. A secondary use of the HJPC is to assist close reading. Chapter outlines of the central chapter of each novel were generated and were found to mirror plot developments and dialogue sections. Salient sentences highlighted many key moments in the plot, or revealed aspects of characters’ personalities