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This book offers an HPSG-based discourse grammar for a controlled language (Air Traffic Control) that allows the identification of well-formed discourse patterns. A formalisation of discourse theoretical structures that occur especially in crisis situations that involve potential aviation disasters is introduced. Of particular importance in this context are discourse sequences that help secure uptake among the crew and between crew and tower in order to coordinate actions that might result in avoiding a potential disaster. In order to describe the relevant phenomena, an extended HPSG formalism is used. The extension concerns the capability of modelling speech acts as proposed by Searle & Vanderveken (1985). The grammar is modelled by employing XML as a denotational semantics and is applied to the corpus data. This work thus lays the foundation for the automatic recognition of discourse structures in aviation communication.
Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.
Prior to his premature death from tuberculosis in 1928, Larry Semon was one of the most popular comics on the silent screen. For a time he rivaled comedy legends Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton for fame and fortune. The son of magician Professor Zera the Great, Semon participated in many of his father's early performances. A talented youth, he worked as an illustrator and cartoonist before going into motion pictures with the Vitagraph Company. He soon became a Hollywood legend, responsible for his own stories, gags, acting and direction. The result of 30 years of research, this long overdue biography recognizes one of Hollywood's most overlooked auteurs. The author draws on numerous articles and contacts with Semon's family and friends, and screens many films previously believed to be lost.
The formal treatment of the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue became possible through a series of breakthroughs in foundational methodology. There is broad consensus on a couple of issues, like the fact that some variety of dynamic theory is necessary to capture certain characteristics of dialogue. Other matters still are disputed. This volume contains papers both of foundational and applied orientation. It is the result of one of a series of specialized Workshops on Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue that took place in 2001. One can therefore truly say that it mirrors both the state of the art at the end of the past millennium and research strategies that are pursued at the beginning of the new millennium. The collected papers cover the range from philosophy of language to computer science, from the analysis of presupposition to investigations into corpora, and touches upon topics like the role of speech acts in dialogue or language specific phenomena. This broad coverage will make the volume valuable for students of dialogue from all fields of expertise.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing 2005, held in Mexico City, Mexico in February 2005. The 53 revised full papers and 35 revised short papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 151 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on computational linguistics forum; semantics and discourse; parsing and syntactic disambiguation; morphology; anaphora and conference; word sense disambiguation; lexical resources; natural language generation; machine translation; speech and natural language interfaces; language documentation; information extraction, information retrieval; question answering; summarization; text classification, categorization, and clustering; named entity recognition; language identification; and spelling and style checking.
It is a commonplace to say that the meaning of text is more than the conjunction of the meaning of its constituents. But what are the rules governing its interpretation, and what are the constraints that define well-formed discourse? Answers to these questions can be given from various perspectives. In this edited volume, leading scientists in the field investigate these questions from structural, cognitive, and computational perspectives. The last decades have seen the development of numerous formal frameworks in which the structure of discourse can be analysed, the most important of them being the Linguistic Discourse Model, Rhetorical Structure Theory and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. This volume contains an introduction to these frameworks and the fundamental topics in research about discourse constraints. Thus it should be accessible to specialists in the field as well as advanced graduate students and researchers from neighbouring areas. The volume is of interest to discourse linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, and computational linguists.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2005, held in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, in September 2005. The 52 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers present a wealth of state-of-the-art research results in the field of natural language processing with an emphasis on text, speech, and spoken dialogue ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields, such as information retrieval, the semantic Web, algorithmic learning, classification and clustering, speaker recognition and verification, and dialogue management.
This book demonstrates that some properties of rightward movement phenomena (a cover term referring to sentences in which an element appears to be “displaced” to the right) may be derived from syntactic principles and interface conditions within the framework of the generative grammar/minimalist program. It also argues that certain properties, which up to now have been dealt with purely in regards to syntax, can be better accounted for in terms of language processing; accordingly, the human parser should undertake explanations of part of the competence system’s output. The volume’s analysis of rightward movement phenomena leads to the conclusion that phrasal rightward movement rules in syntax fail to follow specific principles. At first glance, this conclusion seems identical with Kayne’s (1994) claim that no rightward movement rules exist. However, this work provides completely different grounds for the absence of rightward movement rules, meaning that it presents an original view of rightward movement phenomena.
Like its companion volume, this book offers a detailed description and comparison of three major structural-functional theories: Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar, illustrated throughout with corpus-derived examples from English and other languages. Whereas Part 1 confines itself largely to the simplex clause, Part 2 moves from the clause towards the discourse and its context. The first three chapters deal with the areas of illocution, information structuring (topic and focus, theme and rheme, given and new information, etc.), and clause combining within complex sentences. Chapter 4 examines approaches to discourse, text and context across the three theories. The fifth chapter deals with the learning of language by both native and non-native speakers, and applications of the theories in stylistics, computational linguistics, translation and contrastive studies, and language pathology. The final chapter assesses the extent to which each theory attains the goals it sets for itself, and then outlines a programme for the development of an integrated approach responding to a range of criteria of descriptive and explanatory adequacy.