475,077 research outputs found

    The impact of direct speech framing expressions on the narrative: a contrastive case study of Gabriel García Márquez’s Buen viaje, señor Presidente and its English translation

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    The impact of direct speech framing expressions on the narrative: a contrastive case study of Gabriel García Márquez’s Buen viaje, señor Presidente and its English translationThis paper discusses an application of Relevance Theory methodology to an analysis of a literary text: a short story of Gabriel García Márquez “Buen viaje, señor Presidente” and its English translation. “Close reading” technique carried out on rather linguistic than literary basis allows for adding yet another layer of interpretation to this complex story. The analysis concentrates on the representation of direct speech and particularly on the impact of direct speech framing clauses on the reading of dialogic turns. Specifically, it is argued that the explicit mention of the addressee by indirect object pronouns (which are optional in direct speech framing turns) in Spanish makes the tension between the two protagonists even more palpable, therefore apparently courteous turns can be interpreted as defiant or otherwise antagonistic. In English similar role is played by the contrast between the absence of quotative inversion with subject pronouns and its presence when speakers are identified by full nominals. The parallel effect in both linguistic versions is traced to the distinction between linguistic items carrying mainly conceptual meaning (nominals) and carrying mainly procedural meaning (pronouns) and to the different ways these two kind of elements are processed in comprehension. The paper also provides some arguments for leaving aside literary considerations and treating a literary text as an act of ostensive communication

    Coping with Uncertainty: Noun Phrase Interpretation and Early Semantic Analysis

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    A computer program which can "understand" natural language texts must have both syntactic knowledge about the language concerned and semantic knowledge of how what is written relates to its internal representation of the world. It has been a matter of some controversy how these sources of information can best be integrated to translate from an input text to a formal meaning representation. The controversy has concerned largely the question as to what degree of syntactic analysis must be performed before any semantic analysis can take place. An extreme position in this debate is that a syntactic parse tree for a complete sentence must be produced before any investigation of that sentence's meaning is appropriate. This position has been criticised by those who see understanding as a process that takes place gradually as the text is read, rather than in sudden bursts of activity at the ends of sentences. These people advocate a model where semantic analysis can operate on fragments of text before the global syntactic structure is determined - a strategy which we will call early semantic analysis. In this thesis, we investigate the implications of early semantic analysis in the interpretation of noun phrases. One possible approach is to say that a noun phrase is a self-contained unit and can be fully interpreted by the time it has been read. Thus it can always be determined what objects a noun phrase refers to without consulting much more than the structure of the phrase itself. This approach was taken in part by Winograd [Winograd 72], who saw the constraint that a noun phrase have a referent as a valuable aid in resolving local syntactic ambiguity. Unfortunately, Winograd's work has been criticised by Ritchie, because it is not always possible to determine what a noun phrase refers to purely on the basis of local information. In this thesis, we will go further than this and claim that, because the meaning of a noun phrase can be affected by so many factors outside the phrase itself, it makes no sense to talk about "the referent" as a function of -a noun phrase. Instead, the notion of "referent" is something defined by global issues of structure and consistency. Having rejected one approach to the early semantic analysis of noun phrases, we go on to develop an alternative, which we call incremental evaluation. The basic idea is that a noun phrase does provide some information about what it refers to. It should be possible to represent this partial information and gradually refine it as relevant implications of the context are followed up. Moreover, the partial information should be available to an inference system, which, amongst other things, can detect the absence of a referent and provide the advantages of Winograd's system. In our system, noun phrase interpretation does take place locally, but the point is that it does not finish there. Instead, the determination of the meaning of a noun phrase is spread over the subsequent analysis of how it contributes to the meaning of the text as a whole

    The impact of direct speech framing expressions on the narrative: a contrastive case study of Gabriel García Márquez’s Buen viaje, señor Presidente and its English translation

    Get PDF
    The impact of direct speech framing expressions on the narrative: a contrastive case study of Gabriel García Márquez’s Buen viaje, señor Presidente and its English translation This paper discusses an application of Relevance Theory methodology to an analysis of a literary text: a short story of Gabriel García Márquez “Buen viaje, señor Presidente” and its English translation. “Close reading” technique carried out on rather linguistic than literary basis allows for adding yet another layer of interpretation to this complex story. The analysis concentrates on the representation of direct speech and particularly on the impact of direct speech framing clauses on the reading of dialogic turns. Specifically, it is argued that the explicit mention of the addressee by indirect object pronouns (which are optional in direct speech framing turns) in Spanish makes the tension between the two protagonists even more palpable, therefore apparently courteous turns can be interpreted as defiant or otherwise antagonistic. In English similar role is played by the contrast between the absence of quotative inversion with subject pronouns and its presence when speakers are identified by full nominals. The parallel effect in both linguistic versions is traced to the distinction between linguistic items carrying mainly conceptual meaning (nominals) and carrying mainly procedural meaning (pronouns) and to the different ways these two kind of elements are processed in comprehension. The paper also provides some arguments for leaving aside literary considerations and treating a literary text as an act of ostensive communication

    Особенности интерпретации текста судебного решения США

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    The article focuses on interpretation of English-language texts of court opinions. The author briefly considers existing models of text comprehension, while opting for cognitive approach as the basis for analysis of the judicial discourse. The article provides a meta-language developed as analysis methodology of linguistic means of frames’ representation. US court opinions were used as material for analysis. The author also suggests that linguistic means of modus functions’ representation frequently create additional senses in judicial discourse. The paper concludes that the reference to precedent, in addition to the functions of legal reasoning, performs evaluative function, expressing the meaning of speaker’ high degree confidence in what is being reported.Данная статья посвящена вопросам интерпретации англоязычного текста судебного решения. Цель статьи - рассмотреть возможность интерпретации текста на основе фреймового подхода. Автор анализирует наиболее известные модели понимания текста, обосновывая свой выбор когнитивного подхода к анализу судебного дискурса. В статье предлагается метаязык описания фреймовых слотов, на основе которого предпринимается попытка интерпретации их языковой репрезентации. Материалом исследования послужили тексты судебных решений Апелляционного суда США, которые анализируются с использованием методов лингвистического и фреймового анализа. На основе полученных результатов исследования выдвигается предположение о том, что большую роль в создании дополнительных смыслов играет языковое наполнение модусных слотов аргументативных фреймов судебного дискурса. В статье также делается вывод о том, что ссылка на прецедент, помимо функции правового обоснования, несет еще и оценочную функцию высокой степени уверенности в сообщаемом

    Information and Experience in Metaphor: A Perspective From Computer Analysis

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    Novel linguistic metaphor can be seen as the assignment of attributes to a topic through a vehicle belonging to another domain. The experience evoked by the vehicle is a significant aspect of the meaning of the metaphor, especially for abstract metaphor, which involves more than mere physical similarity. In this article I indicate, through description of a specific model, some possibilities as well as limitations of computer processing directed toward both informative and experiential/affective aspects of metaphor. A background to the discussion is given by other computational treatments of metaphor analysis, as well as by some questions about metaphor originating in other disciplines. The approach on which the present metaphor analysis model is based is consistent with a theory of language comprehension that includes both the intent of the originator and the effect on the recipient of the metaphor. The model addresses the dual problem of (a) determining potentially salient properties of the vehicle concept, and (b) defining extensible symbolic representations of such properties, including affective and other connotations. The nature of the linguistic analysis underlying the model suggests how metaphoric expression of experiential components in abstract metaphor is dependent on the nominalization of actions and attributes. The inverse process of undoing such nominalizations in computer analysis of metaphor constitutes a translation of a metaphor to a more literal expression within the metaphor-nonmetaphor dichotomy

    Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto.

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    Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given

    Bakhtin as a theory of reading

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    Includes bibliographical references (p. 20

    Section 301(a) and the Employee: An Illusory Remedy

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