Si hypothétique et l’imparfait. Une approche linguistique de la fictionalité

La fictionalité a trop souvent été envisagée comme une caractéristique du seul discours littéraire. Considérant la fictionalité comme une potentialité de la grammaire de la langue, l'auteur propose de ne pas séparer pragmatique littéraire et pragmatique de la langue ordinaire. À la lumière d'un corpus diversifié (publicitaire, journalistique, politique et littéraire), il propose une description unifiée des phrases hypothétiques avec, au passage, une réflexion sur certains emplois réputés marginaux de l'imparfait.Fictionality has too often been considered a characteristic exclusively of literary discourse. Regarding fictionality as a potentiality of the grammar of language, the author does not divorce literary pragmatics from the pragmatics of ordinary language. His study of a diversified corpus (advertisements, newspaper articles, political and literary texts) gives rise to a unifying description of hypothetical sentences. He also examines some reputedly marginal uses of the French imparfait

A study on the effect of communication and monitoring tools in web-based tutoring

ACTA Press, ISSN: 1206-212XInternational audienceAmong Web-based education activities, tutoring is considered to be very efficient. If many studies focus on learner's role, performance, and satisfaction, many questions remain about the effect of the media communication on tutor-student interaction. We report on a study comparing tutor-students' interactions on a practical work session. Students and tutor are connected via audio-only or audio-video links, with or without sharing visual information. Results show that tutors shift the contents of dialogue with students from procedural to contextual sentences, in order to the different media settings

Seeing the face and observing the actions: the effects of nonverbal cues on mediated tutoring dialogue

International audienceMediated communication technologies, conveying verbal and nonverbal cues, are more and more employed in learning activities. Nevertheless, their effects on teacher-student interaction have been not clearly stated yet. Through two experimental studies, we investigated on the effects of nonverbal communication cues (kinesic and ostensive-inferential) on synchronous mediated tutoring dialogue, in which a tutor and a student communicate through audio-video communication tools. The outcomes show that kinesic cues lead tutor to monitor more carefully learner's ongoing task and to encourage much more them, while ostensive-inferential cues improve learner' task performance and lead both tutor and student to focus better on tutoring speech act

A study on the effect of communication and monitoring tools in web-based tutoring

ACTA Press, ISSN: 1206-212XInternational audienceAmong Web-based education activities, tutoring is considered to be very efficient. If many studies focus on learner's role, performance, and satisfaction, many questions remain about the effect of the media communication on tutor-student interaction. We report on a study comparing tutor-students' interactions on a practical work session. Students and tutor are connected via audio-only or audio-video links, with or without sharing visual information. Results show that tutors shift the contents of dialogue with students from procedural to contextual sentences, in order to the different media settings

The impact of nonverbal cues on mediated tutoring interaction: an experimental study

ISBN 978-83-60810-21-7International audienceVideo-mediated settings are more and more used in several mediated human activities, as teaching. Nevertheless, we do not deeply know yet the functions of nonverbal cues that these communication technologies make available to distant participants. The aim of this paper is to enrich the field of video-mediated communication studies, focusing on the effect of nonverbal cues on a video-mediated tutoring situation. We will first state communication theoretical underpinnings and then we will focus on the role of kinesic cues and ostensive-inferential cues in communication and mediated activities. After that we will describe our experimental method, explain in details the coding scheme we used to analyze the tutoring dialogue and the measures we collected. We will finally conclude with a discussion of our outcomes to highlight some convergences in regard to the previous literature and to the design of user interfaces in video-mediated tutoring environmen

Taxonomic distribution of large DNA viruses in the sea

Phylogenetic mapping of metagenomics data reveals the taxonomic distribution of large DNA viruses in the sea, including giant viruses of the Mimiviridae family

Horizontal gene transfer and nucleotide compositional anomaly in large DNA viruses

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>DNA viruses have a wide range of genome sizes (5 kb up to 1.2 Mb, compared to 0.16 Mb to 1.5 Mb for obligate parasitic bacteria) that do not correlate with their virulence or the taxonomic distribution of their hosts. The reasons for such large variation are unclear. According to the traditional view of viruses as gifted "gene pickpockets", large viral genome sizes could originate from numerous gene acquisitions from their hosts. We investigated this hypothesis by studying 67 large DNA viruses with genome sizes larger than 150 kb, including the recently characterized giant mimivirus. Given that horizontally transferred DNA often have anomalous nucleotide compositions differing from the rest of the genome, we conducted a detailed analysis of the inter- and intra-genome compositional properties of these viruses. We then interpreted their compositional heterogeneity in terms of possible causes, including strand asymmetry, gene function/expression, and horizontal transfer.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We first show that the global nucleotide composition and nucleotide word usage of viral genomes are species-specific and distinct from those of their hosts. Next, we identified compositionally anomalous (cA) genes in viral genomes, using a method based on Bayesian inference. The proportion of cA genes is highly variable across viruses and does not exhibit a significant correlation with genome size. The vast majority of the cA genes were of unknown function, lacking homologs in the databases. For genes with known homologs, we found a substantial enrichment of cA genes in specific functional classes for some of the viruses. No significant association was found between cA genes and compositional strand asymmetry. A possible exogenous origin for a small fraction of the cA genes could be confirmed by phylogenetic reconstruction.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>At odds with the traditional dogma, our results argue against frequent genetic transfers to large DNA viruses from their modern hosts. The large genome sizes of these viruses are not simply explained by an increased propensity to acquire foreign genes. This study also confirms that the anomalous nucleotide compositions of the cA genes is sometimes linked to particular biological functions or expression patterns, possibly leading to an overestimation of recent horizontal gene transfers.</p