Inférences réflexives dans la publicité

Advertisements are so ubiquitous nowadays that capturing the addressee’s attention and maintaining it long enough for them to be fully processed have become fundamental objectives for advertisers. Employing specific strategies in the design of the advertisement contributes efficiently to achieving these goals, getting the audience not only to attend the stimulus but also to process it in certain ways favourable for the advertiser. We argue that Relevance theory, an approach to communication built on a massively modular view of cognition, offers the right tools to explain the nature of the interpretative processes in verbal comprehension. Knowledge of the relevance-based reflexive inferential procedures involved in utterance interpretation allows advertisers to foresee the addressee’s processing behaviour, giving them the possibility to control it in a such a way that the intended interpretative effects are achieved in the desired way

Garden-path utterances and relevance

An appropriate account of how the interpretation process of garden-path utterances develops should include an analysis of those psycholinguistic aspects related to the recovery of the semantic representations of the utterance as well as a pragmatic explanation of how those representations are used in the construction of a final interpretation. To investigate how lexical access could take place in the case of ambiguous words, two psycholinguistic models are briefly reviewed: the selective model and the exhaustive model. An argument is put forward for the exhaustive model, that is, for a modular view of the lexical processing system. Thus, we argue that in the processing of a garden-path utterance, upon encountering an ambiguous word, all of its meanings are initially activated. Once access has been completed and the selection phase reached, pragmatic factors come into play, in the process of selecting one of the possibilities and building an interpretation from it. Relevance theory, a cognitive-pragmatic account of communication, explains why a given interpretation is initially selected, why it is later rejected as contextually inappropriate and why the processor tries a second line of interpretation which will finally produce the desired results

Building a Corpus of 2L English for Automatic Assessment: the CLEC Corpus

In this paper we describe the CLEC corpus, an ongoing project set up at the University of Cádiz with the purpose of building up a large corpus of English as a 2L classified according to CEFR proficiency levels and formed to train statistical models for automatic proficiency assessment. The goal of this corpus is twofold: on the one hand it will be used as a data resource for the development of automatic text classification systems and, on the other, it has been used as a means of teaching innovation techniques

LEXICAL AMBIGUITY AND INTERPRETATION. A COGNITIVE APPROACH. GARDEN-PATH UTTERANCES AND BIVALENT UTTERANCES

En este trabajo se desarrolla una hipótesis explicativa de las fases y mecanismos mentales involucrados en el proceso interpretativo de aquellos enunciados en los que la presencia de determinados elementos léxicos ambiguos da lugar a situaciones de doble interpretación, enuncidos bivalentes o puns, o que requieren de una doble operación de procesamiento para su correcta interpretación, enunciados de interpretación retroactiva o garden-path. Se analizan los distintos pasos del proceso interpretativo a que estos enunciados se ven sometidos en cada caso. Se defiende y argumenta la necesidad de construir un análisis que combine el estudio de los aspectos relativos a los procesos de acceso léxico de los distintos significados de la ambigüedad, responsabilidad de las teorías psicolingüísticas, y aquellos factores de carácter pragmático que seguidamente intervienen en la construcción de la interpretación resultante en cada caso. Las teorías psicolingüísticas de acceso múltiple y la teoría pragmática de la pertinencia sirven de marco teórico para construir una hipótesis explicativa.This thesis develops an explanatory hypothesis about the phases and mental mechanisms involved in the interpretative process of utterances in which the presence of certain ambiguous lexical elements gives rise to a double interpretation, as in puns, or requires a double processing operation for the intended interpretation(s) to be built, as in garden-path utterances. The different steps of the interpretative process these utterances are subjected to in each case are exhaustively examined. We argue for the need to construct an analysis that combines the study of psycholinguistic aspects relative to the processes of lexical access to the different meanings of ambiguity and those factors of a pragmatic nature that subsequently intervene to determine the resulting interpretation in each case. Psycholinguistic theories of multiple lexical access and Relevance theory, a cognitive approach to communication, serve as the theoretical framework for constructing an explanatory hypothesis of these cases

Analysing corpus-based criterial conjunctions for automatic proficiency classification

The linguistic profiling of L2 learning texts can be taken as a model for automatic proficiency assessment of new texts. But proficiency levels are distinguished by many different linguistic features among which the use of cohesive devices can be a criterial element for level distinctions, either in the number of conjunctions used (quantitative) and/or in the type and variety of them (qualitative). We have carried such an analysis with a subgroup of the CLEC (CEFR-levelled English Corpus) using Coh-Metrix, a tool for computing computational cohesion and coherence metrics for written and spoken texts, but our results suggest that automatic proficiency level assessment needs a deeper examination of conjunctions that should rely on the analysis of conjunction-types use and conjunction varieties, with an analysis of lexical choice. A variable based on familiarity ranks could help to predict cohesive levels proficiencyoriented