Катафорски облици заменица ово, то, оно у расцепљеним (cleft) реченицама у српском језику

The objective of the paper is to analyze Serbian impersonal genderless pronouns ovo, to, ono (this, it, that) from the perspective of their cataphoric use and different distribution within clefts and pseudoclefts. The author argues that the above pronouns have full semantic meaning in these constructions. Their cataphoric use is based on the parameters of minimal Distance and strong Unity (Accessibility Theory, ARIEL, 1990, 2001), while the difference in distribution within clefts/pseudoclefts is triggered by various cognitive statuses (GUNDEL, HEDBERG et al. 1993) that they create in the mind of conversational participants.U radu su analizirane neutralne opštepredmetne zamenice ovo, to, ono sa stanovišta njihove kataforske upotrebe i različite distribucije u okviru pravih i prividnih rascepljenih (cleft/pseudocleft) rečenica. Neutralne opštepredmetne zamenice u kontekstu ovih konstrukcija su razmatrane kao semantički punoznačni oblici. Njihova kataforska upotreba je objašnjena na osnovu odgovarajuće udaljenosti i jedinstva - parametara teorije dostupnosti (Accessibility Theory, ARIEL 1990, 2001) dok je njihova distribucija u rascepljenim rečenicama motivisana različitim kognitivnim statusima referenta (GUNDEL, HEDBERG i dr. 1993) u svesti govornika i slušaoca

Discourse Relations and Evaluation

We examine the role of discourse relations (relations between propositions) in the interpretation of evaluative or opinion words. Through a combination of Rhetorical Structure Theory or RST (Mann & Thompson, 1988) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), we analyze how different discourse relations modify the evaluative content of opinion words, and what impact the nucleus-satellite structure in RST has on the evaluation. We conduct a corpus study, examining and annotating over 3,000 evaluative words in 50 movie reviews in the SFU Review Corpus (Taboada, 2008) with respect to five parameters: word category (nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs), prior polarity (positive, negative or neutral), RST structure (both nucleus-satellite status and relation type) and change of polarity as a result of being part of a discourse relation (Intensify, Downtone, Reversal or No Change). Results show that relations such as Concession, Elaboration, Evaluation, Evidence and Restatement most frequently intensify the polarity of the opinion words, although the majority of evaluative words (about 70%) do not undergo changes in their polarity because of the relations they are a part of. We also find that most opinion words (about 70%) are positioned in the nucleus, confirming a hypothesis in the literature, that nuclei are the most important units when extracting evaluation automatically

The Semantics of Evaluational Adjectives: Perspectives from Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Appraisal

We apply the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014) to the lexical-semantic analysis of English evaluational adjectives and compare the results with the picture developed in the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005). The analysis is corpus-assisted, with examples mainly drawn from film and book reviews, and supported by collocational and statistical information from WordBanks Online. We propose NSM explications for 15 evaluational adjectives, arguing that they fall into five groups, each of which corresponds to a distinct semantic template. The groups can be sketched as follows: “First-person thought-plus-affect”, e.g. wonderful; “Experiential”, e.g. entertaining; “Experiential with bodily reaction”, e.g. gripping; “Lasting impact”, e.g. memorable; “Cognitive evaluation”, e.g. complex, excellent. These groupings and semantic templates are compared with the classifications in the Appraisal Framework’s system of Appreciation. In addition, we are particularly interested in sentiment analysis, the automatic identification of evaluation and subjectivity in text. We discuss the relevance of the two frameworks for sentiment analysis and other language technology applications

Discourse structure and attitudinal valence of opinion words in sentiment extraction

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Centering Theory, transitions and referent marking in the corpus of the written Serbian language

The aim of the paper is to map various types of anaphor to the centering transitions in the corpus of Serbian newspaper articles. Centering Theory (WALKER, JOSHI ET AL. 1998) is a theory of local coherence in which four types of transitions are used as parameters of coherence. As is hypothesized in the previous literature based on various languages, the CONTINUE transition is mostly characterized by a minimal form (a zero form of the topic), while the SMOOTH and ROUGH shifts are found with a full noun phrase topic. The analysis shows that the “Ordering Rule” of Centering Theory is not fully followed in the written corpus of the Serbian language since SMOOTH SHIFT has been identified as a prevalent type of transition in the corpus. The following two reasons were identified for that: (1) the genre of the newspaper articles, and (2) the way clauses are combined within a complex sentence in the Serbian written corpus