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This study examines the linguistic tools which enable speakers and writers to propose adjustments and re-adjustments of the sentences they’ve just produced, as well as the goals they fulfil by doing so. We examine corrections, reformulations, specifications, modifications of points of views and link them with discursive strategies. (Re)-adjustments can be made in order to express oneself in a better way, to favor comprehension by adapting to the addressee, to structure one’s intervention, to play on the potentialities of language (polysemy, homonymy, ambiguity), to mention the main purposes associated with the use of those devices. The study focuses on the markers associated with those strategies. Therefore, it links the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels.
The use of experimental methodology in the field of linguistics has boomed in recent decades. However, implementation of such methods does require an understanding and mastery of specific theoretical and methodological principles. Introduction to Experimental Linguistics presents the key concepts of experimental linguistics in an accessible way, addressing, in turn: the application of experimentation in linguistics; the techniques most frequently used for the study of language; the methodological and practical aspects useful for the implementation of an experiment; and an introduction to the analysis of quantitative data derived from experiments. This didactic book combines the elements presented with examples drawn from the various fields of linguistics. It also includes a number of resources available for people who wish to implement an experimental study, more advanced reading suggestions, and revision questions along with their answer key.
This book is a result of the 2013 CLAVIER Conference held in Modena in November 2013, and includes a selection of the papers presented on that occasion. As the title suggests, this volume encourages cross-generic and cross-disciplinary investigations, in order to advocate integrated approaches to the study of media discourse regarding both theoretical background and practical applications. Bringing together a wide range of case studies, the book fosters debate on a variety of aspects related to the representation of specialised discourse in and through the media, including, for example, voice and point of view, argumentative practices, knowledge construction, multimodality, the re-contextual...
Reformulation and Acquisition of Linguistic Complexity proposes a new answer to the question of the appropriation or acquisition of a mother tongue – a complex object, one that is both stable and perpetually evolving. This answer is based on the reformulating principle that children spontaneously apply; a principle that is illustrated here with children retelling the same story. These children are all 6, 8 or 10 years old and speak French, Italian, Croatian or Polish as a first language. This book demonstrates that the acquisition of any mother tongue is explained by the application of various reformulation procedures between source predications and reformulated predications. These procedures are comparable from one language to another, and different from one age group to another. This book also studies certain complex phenomena at the lexical and syntactical levels, and analyzes how children, depending on their age, treat these phenomena. Finally, we show that the acquisition of a mother tongue is a fundamentally linguistic activity.
Humans use countless tools and are constantly creating new ones. We are so prone to materiality that the changes we implement in our environment could put our very survival at stake. It has therefore become necessary to question the cognitive origins of this materiality. The Tool Instinct examines this subject by diametrically setting aside the idea that tool use is limited to manual activity. It proposes an original perspective that surpasses a great number of false beliefs regarding the relationship between humans and tools. The author argues that the human tendency to create and use tools relies on our ability (one that may be unique to our species) to generate our own physical problems, thereby resulting in a reasoning that is directed towards our physical world.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of opinion-heavy texts on the Web: opinions of Internet users, comments on social networks, etc. Automating the synthesis of opinions has become crucial to gaining an overview on a given topic. Current automatic systems perform well on classifying the subjective or objective character of a document. However, classifications obtained from polarity analysis remain inconclusive, due to the algorithms' inability to understand the subtleties of human language. Automatic Detection of Irony presents, in three stages, a supervised learning approach to predicting whether a tweet is ironic or not. The book begins by analyzing some everyday examples of irony and presenting a reference corpus. It then develops an automatic irony detection model for French tweets that exploits semantic traits and extralinguistic context. Finally, it presents a study of portability in a multilingual framework (Italian, English, Arabic).
This book analyzes how the past and its representation in the public space have been a source of conflict in Chile since the end of the Pinochet regime. From a multi-disciplinary perspective (sociology, anthropology and history), it studies the work of seven organizations of memory and human rights in Santiago, Chile, the struggles in which they are engaged, and the main debates that have arisen in the country around the themes of impunity, truth and memory. Covering the period from 1998 to 2018, this book begins its analysis with the detention of Augusto Pinochet in London and concludes with the end of the second term of Michelle Bachelet. The seven organizations studied range from family g...
As time goes on, big companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple become increasingly interested in virtual assistants. The interest and development of social robots has put research into affective and social computing at the forefront of the scene. The aim of Opinion Analysis in Interactions is to present methods based on artificial intelligence through a combination of machine learning models and symbolic approaches. Also discussed are natural language processing and affective computing, via the analysis and generation of socio-emotional signals. The book explores the analysis of opinions in human–human interaction and tackles the less-explored (yet crucial) challenges related to the analysis methods of user opinions within the context of human–agent interaction. It also illustrates the implementation of strategies for selecting and generating agent utterances in response to user opinions, and opens up perspectives on the agent’s multimodal generation of utterances that hold attitudes.
This book studies formal semantics in modern type theories (MTTsemantics). Compared with simple type theory, MTTs have much richer type structures and provide powerful means for adequate semantic constructions. This offers a serious alternative to the traditional settheoretical foundation for linguistic semantics and opens up a new avenue for developing formal semantics that is both model-theoretic and proof-theoretic, which was not available before the development of MTTsemantics. This book provides a reader-friendly and precise description of MTTs and offers a comprehensive introduction to MTT-semantics. It develops several case studies, such as adjectival modification and copredication, to exemplify the attractiveness of using MTTs for the study of linguistic meaning. It also examines existing proof assistant technology based on MTT-semantics for the verification of semantic constructions and reasoning in natural language. Several advanced topics are also briefly studied, including dependent event types, an application of dependent typing to event semantics.
Cet ouvrage porte sur les connecteurs de l'anglais, envisagés aussi à travers la comparaison avec le français. Il rassemble huit contributions qui s'appuient sur des corpus diversifiés, authentiques ou traduits, issus de la langue écrite et de la langue orale. Au-delà du rôle informationnel des connecteurs, quel type de relation construisent-ils entre les propositions qu'ils relient ? Lieu privilégié de l'interaction entre syntaxe, sémantique, lexique et pragmatique, les connecteurs amènent le linguiste à s'interroger sur la manière dont ces domaines s'articulent dans l'organisation textuelle. En confrontant différents connecteurs proches mais non synonymes pour autant, en opposant la connexion à l'absence de connecteur, les différentes contributions de ce volume explorent des relations discursives de continuité, contraste et rupture, et montrent quel rôle les connecteurs jouent dans la cohésion du discours. Il ressort de cet examen que concession, contradiction et reformulation mettent en jeu le point de vue de l'autre en tant que pivot incontournable de toute argumentation.