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

Adventure Tales, Colonialism, and Alexander Montgomery\u27s Australian Perspective

In her paper, Adventure Tales, Colonialism, and Alexander Montgomery\u27s Australian Perspective, Christine Doran discusses an early nineteenth-century example of Australian literature dealing with Southeast Asia. The text analysed is about Borneo, in a collection of short stories by Alexander Montgomery entitled Five-Skull Island and Other Tales of the Malay Archipelago, published in Melbourne in 1897. In the paper, Doran\u27s focus is on Montgomery\u27s adventure tales and she situates the texts within their literary and cultural contexts. Montgomery\u27s writing is then analyzed in the light of postcolonial scholarship. Doran argues that in several important ways this author\u27s work runs counter to the assertions made by some scholars of postcolonial studies concerning the nature of late nineteenth-century colonial fiction. In particular, Doran\u27s analysis suggests that a close-text interpretation -- executed within a cultural context -- of Montgomery\u27s text allows several commonly accepted generalizations concerning racism and masculinism within colonial literary discourse to be questioned. A minor Australian writer, of Irish descent and with marked working-class sympathies, Alexander Montgomery was able to adopt a perspective on colonial Southeast Asia from down under. As Doran shows, Montgomery wrote from the point of view of those, whether of European or Asian ancestry, who struggled for survival in the colonized territories. Montgomery\u27s texts thus present a challenging view of the colonial context from the margins of the British-European empire

Vera Brittain: The Work of Memorial in an Age of War

In her trajectory from sheltered, unmarried middle-class woman to mature rational adult capable of fending for herself on the streets of London, Vera Brittain marks the power of work, even with its inherent restrictions, to negotiate and survive trauma. Work, the speaking out in public about the issues—the sexual, physical, emotional, and intellectual jeopardy of women sparked by keeping them ignorant, liable to break under the shocks they experienced, was the only way to break the cycle and integrate the trauma into a survivable narrative

Les femmes et la politique au Chili : la dynamique et l’impact de l’accession au pouvoir de Michelle Bachelet

Cet article se penche sur la signification de l’élection d’une présidente au Chili dans des conditions politiques atypiques. Dans un contexte où l’élection de Michelle Bachelet, au second tour des présidentielles de 2006, n’émanait ni d’une évolution institutionnelle favorisant une meilleure représentation politique des femmes, ni d’avancées du mouvement féministe au Chili, l’auteure propose d’analyser les éléments qui marquent néanmoins un héritage politique spécifique et sont susceptibles de distinguer et de marquer le passage d’une femme au pouvoir dans la politique chilienne, malgré des conditions institutionnelles défavorables au départ. Seront ainsi analysés les facteurs qui fondent la profonde légitimité de la présidente à gouverner, avec des taux de popularité sans précédents à la fin de son mandat, de même que les orientations politiques particulières qui permettent de distinguer son gouvernement et de parler désormais des « politiques bacheletistes ». Par des avancées en matière d’égalité des conditions des femmes, par l’adoption de politiques pluralistes se revendiquant de l’élargissement des droits universels et d’une position nouvelle en matière de justice, par l’institution de recours judiciaires inédits et par un nouveau style de politique fondé sur la convocation, la première présidente a marqué la politique chilienne d’une option qui lui est propre, tranchant en partie sur la ligne de politiques d’assistance et la démocratie de consensus adoptée par les précédents gouvernements de la Concertation des partis pour la démocratie depuis la fin de la dictature.This article analyses the significance of the election of the first woman to be President of Chile, in atypical political conditions. In a context where the election of Michelle Bachelet was not the outcome of an institutional evolution favorable to a better political representation of women, nor the result of gains made by the Chilean feminist movement, this article proposes to examine some elements that nevertheless show that there is a specific political legacy to Bachelet – as a women – in power, in spite of the unfavorable conditions that prevailed at the start. In order to show this, the article looks at the factors that explain the profound political legitimacy of the President, with unprecedented popularity at the end of her mandate. It also analyzes some specific political orientations that characterize Bachelet’s government and are now considered as “Bacheletistas Politics”. By gains regarding women’s conditions and rights, by pluralistic public policies that rely on the enlargement of universal rights and a new vision of justice, by the institution of new judiciary mechanisms and recourses and by a new political style based on convocation, the first women President has impregnated Chilean politics with a distinctive option that distinguishes it from the type of assistancialist public policies and the consensual democracy led until then by other governments of the Concertación de partidos por la democracia, ever since the end of the dictatorship

Incorporating Punctuation Into the Sentence Grammar: A Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar Perspective

Punctuation helps us to structure, and thus to understand, texts. Many uses of punctuation straddle the line between syntax and discourse, because they serve to combine multiple propositions within a single orthographic sentence. They allow us to insert discourse-level relations at the level of a single sentence. Just as people make use of information from punctuation in processing what they read, computers can use information from punctuation in processing texts automatically. Most current natural language processing systems fail to take punctuation into account at all, losing a valuable source of information about the text. Those which do mostly do so in a superficial way, again failing to fully exploit the information conveyed by punctuation. To be able to make use of such information in a computational system, we must first characterize its uses and find a suitable representation for encoding them. The work here focuses on extending a syntactic grammar to handle phenomena occurring within a single sentence which have punctuation as an integral component. Punctuation marks are treated as full-fledged lexical items in a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar, which is an extremely well-suited formalism for encoding punctuation in the sentence grammar. Each mark anchors its own elementary trees and imposes constraints on the surrounding lexical items. I have analyzed data representing a wide variety of constructions, and added treatments of them to the large English grammar which is part of the XTAG system. The advantages of using LTAG are that its elementary units are structured trees of a suitable size for stating the constraints we are interested in, and the derivation histories it produces contain information the discourse grammar will need about which elementary units have used and how they have been combined. I also consider in detail a few particularly interesting constructions where the sentence and discourse grammars meet-appositives, reported speech and uses of parentheses. My results confirm that punctuation can be used in analyzing sentences to increase the coverage of the grammar, reduce the ambiguity of certain word sequences and facilitate discourse-level processing of the texts