Early English Poetic Culture and Meter: The Influence of G. R. Russom

This volume develops G. R. Russom\u27s contributions to early English meter and style, including his fundamental reworkings and rethinkings of accepted and oft-repeated mantras, including his word-foot theory, concern for the late medieval context for alliterative meter, and the linguistics of punctuation and translation as applied to Old English texts. Ten eminent scholars from across the field take up Russom\u27s ideas to lead readers in new and exciting directions.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_fopl/1003/thumbnail.jp

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

Learning unification-based grammars using the Spoken English Corpus

This paper describes a grammar learning system that combines model-based and data-driven learning within a single framework. Our results from learning grammars using the Spoken English Corpus (SEC) suggest that combined model-based and data-driven learning can produce a more plausible grammar than is the case when using either learning style isolation.Comment: 10 page

The Influence of layout on the interpretation of referring expressions

From the introduction: The division of text into visual segments such as sentences, paragraphs and sections achieves many functions, such as easing navigation, achieving pragmatic effect, improving readability and reflecting the organisation of information (Wright, 1983; Schriver 1997). In this paper, we report a small experiment that investigates the effect of different layout configurations on the interpretation of the antecedent of anaphoric referring expressions. Layout has so far played little role in Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. The layout of output texts is generally very simple. At worst, it consists of only a single paragraph consisting of a few sentences; at best it is predetermined by schemas (Coch, 1996; Porter and Lester, 1997) or discourse plans (Milosavljevic, 1999). However, recent work by Power (2000) and Bouayad et al. (2000) has integrated graphically signalled segments (e.g., by whitespace, punctuation, font and face alternation) such as paragraphs, lists, text-sentences and text-clauses in a hierarchical tree-like representation called the document structure.2 This work was carried out within the ICONOCLAST project (Integrating CONstraints On Layout and Style), which aims at automatically generating formatted texts in which the formatting decisions affect the wording and vice-versa.3 If document structure affects the comprehensibility of referring expressions, this must be taken into account in any attempt to generate felicitous formatted texts. This will go a step further from current research in the automatic generation of referring expressions, where only the effect of discourse structure and grammatical function has been investigated (Dale and Reiter, 1995; Cristea et al., 1998;Walker et al., 1998; Kibble and Power, 1999)

Automatic Extraction of Subcategorization from Corpora

We describe a novel technique and implemented system for constructing a subcategorization dictionary from textual corpora. Each dictionary entry encodes the relative frequency of occurrence of a comprehensive set of subcategorization classes for English. An initial experiment, on a sample of 14 verbs which exhibit multiple complementation patterns, demonstrates that the technique achieves accuracy comparable to previous approaches, which are all limited to a highly restricted set of subcategorization classes. We also demonstrate that a subcategorization dictionary built with the system improves the accuracy of a parser by an appreciable amount.Comment: 8 pages; requires aclap.sty. To appear in ANLP-9

Apportioning Development Effort in a Probabilistic LR Parsing System through Evaluation

We describe an implemented system for robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of English, using a unification-based grammar of part-of-speech and punctuation labels coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We present evaluations of the system's performance along several different dimensions; these enable us to assess the contribution that each individual part is making to the success of the system as a whole, and thus prioritise the effort to be devoted to its further enhancement. Currently, the system is able to parse around 80% of sentences in a substantial corpus of general text containing a number of distinct genres. On a random sample of 250 such sentences the system has a mean crossing bracket rate of 0.71 and recall and precision of 83% and 84% respectively when evaluated against manually-disambiguated analyses.Comment: 10 pages, 1 Postscript figure. To Appear in Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, University of Pennsylvania, May 199

A Cognitive Pragmatic Approach to Punctuation

In the Preface to his “Making a Point”, David Crystal writes: “There are two extreme views about punctuation. The first is that you dont actually need it because its perfectly possible to write down what you want to say without any punctuation marks or capital letters and people can still read it youdontevenneedspacebetweenwordsreally they dont exist when we speak to each other after all and yet we none the less understand what people are saying. The second is that it’s essential because it aids legibility. It’s much easier to read if there’s punctuation. Also, the marks show us how to read aloud in a way that reflects the pauses, rhythm, and melody that we use in speech. They help us see the grammar of complex sentences. And they help us sort out ambiguities – otherwise, nobody would ever have got the joke in Eats, Shoots and Leaves”. (Crystal 2015, p.IX) With individual opinions ranging between the two extremes, the scientific debate mainly focuses on the prosodic versus grammatical function of punctuation. Studies in corpus linguistics and computational analysis of texts similarly hinge on the rhetorico-prosodic vs parsing function of punctuation. In this paper I would like to show that such an approach is an oversimplification and by itself insufficient to explain the complexities of punctuation: no matter how hard we try to systematically connect punctuation with intonation, pauses and syntactic boundaries, exceptions will always turn out in usage that force us to find specific explanations in specific contexts in terms of intentionality, attitudes, pragmatic force, etc. As an alternative, I would like to explore the following hypothesis: punctuation is a complex dynamic system of signs, adaptable to contexts and sensitive to semantic and pragmatic meanings. The proper domain of investigation of punctuation is neither the word nor the sentence but the text/discourse. From a cognitive point of view, punctuation signs contribute to the economy of text interpretability indicating points in the text where cognitive processes may operate to construct a pattern which allows its pragmatic interpretation in an efficient, efficacious and appropriate manner. Within this perspective, I will try to show that text punctuation assumes more or less marked/ more or less natural configurations depending on some choices along scales of naturalness defined by some semiotic parameters, such as diagrammatic iconicity, transparency and salience (among others). The notion of naturalness will furthermore be complemented with the notion of optimality in order to more systematically account for some phenomena like: a) lack of punctuation, as in Joyce’s stream of consciousness: “I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”― James Joyce, Ulysses. and in some students’ e-mails: “Salve professore io ho svolto l'esame di inglese giuridico a settembre 2015 e ottenni l'idoneità tuttavia a causa di impedimenti di tipo lavorativo non ho mai potuto venire a ricevimento per convalidare il voto sul libretto cartaceo purtroppo solo adesso mi accorgo che non è stato convalidato neanche sul libretto elettronico mi chiedevo se fosse necessario recarsi a ricevimento per ottenere questa convalida l'email con il risultato la ho sempre ma sul vecchio indirizzo di posta elettronica (…)” (personal communication) b) Discourse segmentation as in: “And then lots of people started coming into the little station.(…). And the people kept coming into the little station so that it was even more crowded than the big station. And then I couldn’t see the walls anymore and the back of someone’s jacket touched my knee and I felt sick and I started groaning really loudly and the lady on the bench stood up and no one else sat down. And I felt like I felt like when I had a flu and I had to stay in bed all day and all of me hurt and I couldn’t walk or eat or go to sleep or do maths.” (M. Haddon, The curious incident of the dog in the night-time) c) The use of full stops to separate nouns - not sentences or clauses, as grammar would prescribe: “But there is also punishment and self-imposed pain here – guilt, perhaps, at taking the role of breadwinner away from the father. Anxiety. Solitude. Defilement. Despair. Blacking. All these things come together, and we are left with the image of a young boy writhing in agony on the rat-infested floor”. (Oxford English Grammar, 512) d) The emergence of some attitudes (ex. irony) in specific punctuation contexts: Raymond promised to write the article when he had the time. Raymond promised to write the article, when he had the time. Raymond promised to write the article. When he had the time. In psycholinguistics, the role of punctuation has been mostly investigated within the prosodic vs grammatical function perspective. Inappropriate punctuation that is incongruent with the underlying syntax has been proven to impair reading speed and comprehension Some experiments have shown the role of commas as facilitators in disambiguating tasks (especially in garden-path sentences). However, it has also been pointed out that in other, less critical cases, commas seem to be transparent; moreover, the effects of optional punctuation are virtually unknown and in most cases the semantic and pragmatic constraints and implications of some punctuation choices have been totally neglected. The hypothesis put forward in this paper will be substantiated with new experiments focusing on the latter factors. REFERENCES EDWIN BATTISTELLA, 1996 “Marked and Unmarked Punctuation Signs in English”, Prague Linguistic Circle Papers, pp 235- 2. MURAT BAYRAKTAR, SAY BILGE, AKMAN VAROL, 1998, “ An Analysis of English Punctuation: The Special Case of Comma”, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Volume 3, Number 1, 1998, pp. 33-57. MARCELLA BERTUCCELLI, 2006, “Cognitive complexity and the lexicon”, in LAVINIA MERLINI (a c.di), Complexity in language and text, Pisa, Plus, pp.67-116. MARINA BUZZONI, 2008, “La punteggiatura nei testi di lingua inglese”, in BICE MORTARA GARAVELLI (a c. di), Storia della punteggiatura, Bari, Laterza, pp. 442-491. WALLACE CHAFE, 1988,” Punctuation and the Prosody of Written Language”, Written Communication 5, pp. 395-426. DAVID CRYSTAL, 2015, Making a Point, London, Profile Books, 2015. ROBERT DALE, 1991, “Exploring the Role of Punctuation in the Signalling of Discourse Structure”. In Proceedings of a Workshop on Text Representation and Domain Modelling: Ideas from Linguistics and AI, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 110–120. PAUL DE LACY (a c. di), 2007, Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. WOLGANG U. DRESSLER, 1995, “Interactions between iconicity and other semiotic parameters in language”, in Simone (a c. di), pp. 21-37. JOHN HAIMANN, 1985, Iconicity in Syntax, Amsterdam, Benjamins. ANGELA FERRARI, 2003, Le ragioni del testo. Aspetti morfo-sintattici e interpuntivi dell’italiano contemporaneo, Firenze, Accademia della Crusca. ANGELA FERRARI et. al., 2008 L’interfaccia lingua-testo. Forme e funzioni dell’organizzazione informativa dell’enunciato, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso. BENJAMIN GRINDLAY, 2002, Missing the point: the effect of punctuation on reading performance. Adelaide, Australia: Adelaide University dissertation. BERNARD JONES, 1994, “Exploring the Role of Punctuation in Parsing Natural Language”, in Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-94). Kyoto, Japan, 421–425. BERNARD JONES, 1996°, “Towards Testing the Syntax of Punctuation”, in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). Santa Cruz, California, 363–365. BERNARD JONES,1996b, “Towards a Syntactic Account of Punctuation”, in Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-96), Copenhagen, Denmark, 604–609. BERNARD JONES, 1997, “What’s the Point? A (Computational) Theory of Punctuation”, PhD Thesis. Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.Benjamins. WILLY VAN LANGENDONCK, 2010, “Iconicity”, in Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. ANDREA MORO, 2015, I confini di Babele. Il cervello e il mistero delle lingue impossibili, Bologna, Il Mulino