The place near the thing where we went that time: an inferential approach to pragmatic stylistics

This paper considers the exploration of inferential processes involved in interpreting texts as one way of applying ideas from pragmatics within the field of stylistics. There are a number of questions to ask in accounting for specific inferences. Exploring them leads to insights about individual texts, individual inferences and the nature of literary and non-literary interpretation. A number of these questions are briefly considered here. Is the inference derived before, during or after the initial interpretation of the text? What part or parts of the text provide evidence to support the inference (how ‘local’ or ‘global’ is the evidence)? How much support for the inference is provided by the text? How determinate/vague is the inference? Is the inferential process open-ended or is there a fairly clear conclusion to the process? How salient are the inferential processes? How likely is it that interpreters will revisit or continue to think about the inference after the initial interpretation process? Understanding particular inferences, and exploring these questions about them, can help us to understand how a text gives rise to specific effects. In some cases, inferential processes themselves constitute effects of a text. Studying inferential processes is one way in which (pragmatic) stylistics can engage with other areas of literary study, shedding light on questions about literary interpretation, literary criticism and literary value

YHWH, the Trinity, and the Literal Sense: Theological Interpretation of Exodus 3:13–15

In this dissertation, I engage a variety of contexts in reading Exodus 3:13–15. The trend in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Old Testament scholarship was to oppose the meaning of the Hebrew text with later Christian interpretations, which built on Greek and Latin translations. According to this view, the text of Ex 3:13‒15 presents an etymology of the divine name that suggests God’s active presence with Israel or what God will accomplish for Israel; the text does not address the nature or being of God. In Part I, I critique this interpretive trend, arguing that religio-historical approaches to determining the origins of the name “YHWH” and of Yahwism do not substantially help one read the received form of the biblical text, and that Augustine’s interpretation of Ex 3:13–15 provides an example of a pre-modern reading of the literal sense that avoids the problems of which it might be accused. In Part II, I argue that the text of Ex 3:13–15, understood according to the literal sense, addresses both who God is as well as God’s action, and that conversation with Augustine’s reading can help the reader, in a Christian context, to understand the text and its subject matter. Read within the literary contexts of the received form of the book of Exodus and the Pentateuch as a whole, the text of Ex 3:13–15 suggests that Moses’ question addresses more than factual information, even the character and nature of God. The “I am who I am” of v. 14a expresses indefiniteness; while God reveals himself as YHWH and offers this name for the Israelites to call upon him, God is not exhausted by this revelation but rather remains beyond human comprehension and control

The Generation of Compound Nominals to Represent the Essence of Text The COMMIX System

This thesis concerns the COMMIX system, which automatically extracts information on what a text is about, and generates that information in the highly compacted form of compound nominal expressions. The expressions generated are complex and may include novel terms which do not appear themselves in the input text. From the practical point of view, the work is driven by the need for better representations of content: for representations which are shorter and more concise than would appear in an abstract, yet more informative and representative of the actual aboutness than commonly occurs in indexing expressions and key terms. This additional layer of representation is referred to in this work as pertaining to the essence of a particular text. From a theoretical standpoint, the thesis shows how the compound nominal as a construct can be successfully employed in these highly informative representations. It involves an exploration of the claim that there is sufficient semantic information contained within the standard dictionary glosses for individual words to enable the construction of useful and highly representative novel compound nominal expressions, without recourse to standard syntactic and statistical methods. It shows how a shallow semantic approach to content identification which is based on lexical overlap can produce some very encouraging results. The methodology employed, and described herein, is domain-independent, and does not require the specification of templates with which the input text must comply. In these two respects, the methodology developed in this work avoids two of the most common problems associated with information extraction. As regards the evaluation of this type of work, the thesis introduces and utilises the notion of percentage attainment value, which is used in conjunction with subjects' opinions about the degree to which the aboutness terms succeed in indicating the subject matter of the texts for which they were generated

Sentiment Analysis of Text Guided by Semantics and Structure

As moods and opinions play a pivotal role in various business and economic processes, keeping track of one's stakeholders' sentiment can be of crucial importance to decision makers. Today's abundance of user-generated content allows for the automated monitoring of the opinions of many stakeholders, like consumers. One challenge for such automated sentiment analysis systems is to identify whether pieces of natural language text are positive or negative. Typical methods of identifying this polarity involve low-level linguistic analysis. Existing systems predominantly use morphological, lexical, and syntactic cues for polarity, like a text's words, their parts-of-speech, and negation or amplification of the conveyed sentiment. This dissertation argues that the polarity of text can be analysed more accurately when additionally accounting for semantics and structure. Polarity classification performance can benefit from exploiting the interactions that emoticons have on a semantic level with words – emoticons can express, stress, or disambiguate sentiment. Furthermore, semantic relations between and within languages can help identify meaningful cues for sentiment in multi-lingual polarity classification. An even better understanding of a text's conveyed sentiment can be obtained by guiding automated sentiment analysis by the rhetorical structure of the text, or at least of its most sentiment-carrying segments. Thus, the sentiment in, e.g., conclusions can be treated differently from the sentiment in background information. The findings of this dissertation suggest that the polarity of natural language text should not be determined solely based on what is said. Instead, one should account for how this message is conveyed as well

A Poor Concept Script

The formal structure of Frege’s ‘concept script’ has been widely adopted in logic text books since his time, even though its rather elaborate symbols have been abandoned for more convenient ones. But there are major difficulties with its formalisation of pronouns, predicates, and propositions, which infect the whole of the tradition which has followed Frege. It is shown first in this paper that these difficulties are what has led to many of the most notable paradoxes associated with this tradition; the paper then goes on to indicate the lines on which formal logic—and also the lambda calculus and set theory—needs to be restructured, to remove the difficulties. Throughout the study of what have come to be known as first-, second-, and higher-order languages, what has been primarily overlooked is that these languages are abstractions. Many well known paradoxes, we shall see, arose because of the elementary level of simplification which has been involved in the abstract languages studied. Straightforward resolutions of the paradoxes immediately appear merely through attention to languages of greater sophistication, notably natural language, of course. The basic problem has been exclusive attention to a theory in place of what it is a theory of, leading to a focus on mathematical manipulation, which ‘brackets off ’ any natural language reading

The Role of Technical Vocabulary in the Construction of the Medieval Romance Text Type

This paper seeks to discover in what sense we can classify vocabulary items as technical terms in the later medieval period. In order to arrive at a principled categorization of technicality, distribution is taken as a diagnostic factor: vocabulary shared across the widest range of text types may be assumed to be both prototypical for the semantic field, but also the most general and therefore least technical terms since lexical items derive at least part of their meaning from context, a wider range of contexts implying a wider range of senses. A further way of addressing the question of technicality is tested through the classification of the lexis into semantic hierarchies: in the terms of componential analysis, having more components of meaning puts a term lower in the semantic hierarchy and flags it as having a greater specificity of sense, and thus as more technical. The various text types are interrogated through comparison of the number of levels in their hierarchies and number of lexical items at each level within the hierarchies. Focusing on the vocabulary of a single semantic field, DRESS AND TEXTILES, this paper investigates how four medieval text types (wills, sumptuary laws, petitions, and romances) employ technical terminology in the establishment of the conventions of their genres

What can it mean to come from a certain place and from certain people? Reflections on around the question.

This text collects the reflections that I have found the most important and/or best articulated at this point in time when thinking about the question that is also the title of the thesis: what can it mean to come from a certain place and from certain people? On the whole it deals with forms of domination and subjugation realized on social and individual levels that are not separate but in mutual relation of exchange. It proposes that through their analysis and application of critical tools it would be possible to take more informed decisions in personal and public spheres. Possibly it would also help to deconstruct the dominating narratives and look beyond them for solutions for better life as to its ecological and social consequences. Among the themes that I am touching on are: loss of language and loss of culture and its possible consequences; internalizing inferiority and internalizing superiority in the context of historical narratives; nostalgia as a tool for creating alternative to status quo; proposition of countering pride and prejudice with humility and penance; problematics of forgiveness and apology; empathy as necessary element in getting to know histories; considering nonalignment as a possibility and impossibility; reviewing national myths and history in accordance with fact based research and using new theoretical tools; consideration of what could be the new myths that could nourish emergence of more ethical relations between people, and people and the natural world. The text of the thesis is supplemented by documentation of works done around these themes. I see them as tests and experiments and would like them to be considered as elements that might throw additional light on the text rather than on equal terms

The Trouble with Ressentiment

The article comprises an attempt to interpret the conception of ressentiment created by Friedrich Nietzsche. This interpretation concentrates on the analysis of one of the revaluation of values mechanisms, namely their compensatory transformation. The text tries also to demonstrate in what way this mechanism can lead to connecting ressentiment with the phenomena of fundamentalism and fanaticism. The aim of this interpretation of the conception of ressentiment is to sketch the conditions in which ressentiment could entail violence, what was pointed at many times by researchers studying the phenomenon, including the most famous one of them – Roger Scruton (who sees it as one of the causes of terrorism). The interpretation of the conception of ressentiment present in the paper refers not only to philosophical analyses of this phenomenon but also to the research of the socio-psychologists and sociologists, which is essential for this issue. Therefore, in the context of the research on ressentiment the proposed interpretation addresses the problems of the methodological-axiological nature, which are connected with obtaining knowledge on sensitive subjects. The problem of ressentiment is one of such issues