DCU 250 Arabic dependency bank: an LFG gold standard resource for the Arabic Penn treebank

This paper describes the construction of a dependency bank gold standard for Arabic, DCU 250 Arabic Dependency Bank (DCU 250), based on the Arabic Penn Treebank Corpus (ATB) (Bies and Maamouri, 2003; Maamouri and Bies, 2004) within the theoretical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). For parsing and automatically extracting grammatical and lexical resources from treebanks, it is necessary to evaluate against established gold standard resources. Gold standards for various languages have been developed, but to our knowledge, such a resource has not yet been constructed for Arabic. The construction of the DCU 250 marks the first step towards the creation of an automatic LFG f-structure annotation algorithm for the ATB, and for the extraction of Arabic grammatical and lexical resources

The bad homosexual: Genet's perverse homo-politics

Although widely recognized as pivotal texts in the history of homosexual literature, Genet's novels occupied a largely negative position within gay criticism of the 1990s, by which they were seen to reproduce heterocentric, even homophobic assumptions about same-sex desire. This article argues that Genet's contentious decision to articulate homoerotic desire within the space of a heteronormative language is one necessitated by the structural constraints of language itself. Metafictively drawing attention to the absence of a language in which to communicate homoerotic desire, Genet represents his narrators and characters as locked in a closet of heteronormative language. His strategic response to this silencing is to appropriate and recontextualize heterocentric and homophobic discourses in ways that problematize their assumed heteronormativity. In contrast to the gay critical focus on whether Genet himself has internalized heteronormative assumptions about his sexuality and subjectivity, Genet's texts remind us that the question is not simply an individualized one of what the author him/herself thinks, but rather how s/he might articulate expressions of desire within a language that seems designed to erase such expressions of difference