An Annotation Scheme for Reichenbach's Verbal Tense Structure

In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points, with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations in language. This allows for precise reasoning about tense in documents, and the deduction of temporal relations between the times and verbal events in a discourse. We define the syntax of RTMML, and demonstrate the markup in a range of situations

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

Principles of event framing : genetic stability in grammar and discourse

Ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1836) pioneering study of Nahuatl, linguists have recurrently recognized that languages differ fundamentally in the syntactic weight they attribute to noun-phrases as the arguments of a verb. Currently, the most prominent attempts to turn this intuition into a precise hypothesis revolve around the notion of ‘configurationality’

Teaching & Learning The Spanish Aspect Using Blogs and Wikis: An Exploratory Study

This study investigated the influence of asynchronous computer text based technologies on the students’ performance when learning the preterite and the imperfect aspects in Spanish. Two research questions guided the study: Research Question 1) Is there a difference in students’ achievement levels in Spanish preterite and imperfect between those using wiki technologies and those using blog technologies after controlling for pre-intervention achievement levels? and Research Question 2) Are there differences in satisfaction levels for students learning Spanish preterite and imperfect via blog technologies as compared to those learning via wiki technologies? Results indicate that there were not significant differences between students who use blog or wiki technologies on performance levels when controlling for pre-existing knowledge. Results also indicated that there were not significant differences in satisfaction levels between those students using a wiki and those using a blog. These results suggest that wikis and blogs are good potential tools that may facilitate the teaching and learning of problematic grammar structures in a narrative context

Tense and the Logic of Change

In this paper it is shown how the DRT (Discourse Representation Theory) treatment of temporal anaphora can be formalized within a version of Montague Semantics that is based on classical type logic

History in images / history in words : reflections on the possibility of really putting history on film (or what a historian begins to think about when people start turning his books into movies)

This was supposed to be easy. A chance to bring together all my thoughts on film and history. To make my inchoate notions coherent. To force myself to see what it is I have been thinking. But it has not been easy--more like attempting to pick up water and hold it in your hand. The ideas will not cohere. They change between the thinking and the writing of them. They slip away. They refuse to blend into a whole. Is it me? Is it the subject? I won't even bother with that one. The point is to say only what I can. Which means refusing to make artificial sense of ideas that will not make sense. Which means refusing to bridge the gaps in my knowledge. Which means refusing to make connections where connections do not yet (in my mind) exist. Which means abandoning the idea of an essay and doing no more than sharing some of my reflections and the ideas I have wrestled with during the months I have been attempting to write this piece. Which means there will be no linear development, no attempt at closure, no final answers to the questions posed by the elusive problem of can we represent history on film

Use of Verb Inflections in the Oral Expression of Agrammatic Spanish-Speaking Aphasics

Studies on agrammatic verb errors have basically addressed the production of verb forms as whole lexical units without looking at their inflectional affixes. There has been limited research assessing the possible role of the variables encapsulated in verbal inflections in verb access and retrieval. The purpose of this investigation was to, first, address the possible factors causing a hierarchy of sparing in Spanish verb inflections, and, second, extend the explanatory factors proposed by earlier cross-linguistic investigations on verb inflectional performance by agrammatic speakers. This investigation studied the production of verb inflections by agrammatic Spanish speakers in a sentence repetition task. Twelve native Venezuelan Spanish-speaking subjects, six agrammatics and six controls, participated in this study. The variables predicted to have a critical role in simple and compound verb repetition were: verb form structure, daily usage frequency, theme vowel frequency, paradigmatic frequency, stress, syllabic length, and number. Two separate analyses of the subjects\u27 responses were conducted. The first analysis assessed the number of correct responses per variable feature for all the presented experimental stimuli, namely, simple and compound verb forms. The second analysis, only involving the variables that were significant in the first analysis and pairing each variable with each other, was only conducted for the correct responses for simple verb forms. Overall findings showed a hierarchy of importance of variables in verb repetition by agrammatic Spanish-speaking subjects. First, three variables consistently emerged as primary factors in successful verb repetition by the agrammatic subjects in both analyses: syllabic length, number, and daily usage frequency. Second, stress, having a crucial facilitating role in the first analysis, did not show such a strong effect in the second analysis. Third, paradigmatic frequency did not have any impact in the second analysis. Finally, conjugation class did not have a significant effect in the first analysis (and so was not used in the second analysis). These results imply that short, singular, frequently used, and, possibly, unstressed verb inflections are the most likely to be repeated correctly by Spanish-speaking agrammatics