Download or read book Information structure in Isthmus Zapotec narrative and conversation written by Juan José Bueno Holle and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an in-depth description of information structure in Isthmus Zapotec, an Otomanguean language spoken by around 50,000 people in southeastern Oaxaca, Mexico, and represents the first book-length treatment of information structure in a Mesoamerican language. Three main observations motivate the study: Strong documentation and a relatively large and active speaker community create a unique opportunity to document information structure in Isthmus Zapotec and to study the language as it is used by speakers in everyday life;As a tonal and verb-initial language, the examination of Isthmus Zapotec represents a chance to explore the possible combinations of tone, intonation, morphology and verb-initial syntax that may occur in the coding of information structure; andThe close analysis of spontaneous speech in an endangered language contributes to our theoretical understanding of information structure and informs our knowledge of language documentation practices and revitalization efforts. Overall, the analysis presented here demonstrates the value and need for information structure studies to document and analyze naturally-occurring data.
Download or read book Information structure and information theory written by Robin Lemke and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2024-09-19 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume results from the workshop "Discourse obligates – How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express" at the 44th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society in Tübingen, Germany. The workshop brought - and this book brings - together information-structural and information-theoretic perspectives on optional variation between linguistic encodings. Previously, linguistic phenomena like linearization, the choice between syntactic constructions or the distribution of ellipsis have been investigated from an information-structural or information-theoretic perspective, but the relationship between these approaches remains underexplored. The goal of this book is to look more in detail into how information structure and information theory contribute to explaining linguistic variation, to what extent they explain different encoding choices and whether they interact in doing so. Using experimental and corpus-based methods, the contributions investigate this on different languages, historical stages and levels of linguistic analysis.
Download or read book Information structure in spoken Japanese written by Natsuko Nakagawa and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2020-12-28 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores information structure (IS) within the framework of corpus linguistics and functional linguistics. As a case study, it investigates IS phenomena in spoken Japanese: particles including so-called topic particles, case particles, and zero particles; word order; and intonation. The study discusses how these phenomena are related to cognitive and communicative mechanisms of humans.
Download or read book Saying and Doing in Zapotec written by Mark A. Sicoli and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multimodal ethnography of language as living process, this book demonstrates methods for the integrated analysis of talk, gesture, and material culture, developing a fresh way to understand human language through a focus on jointly achieved social actions to which it is part. Based on findings from a participatory, multimedia language documentation project in a highland Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, Mark A. Sicoli brings together goals of documentary linguistics and anthropological concern with the everyday means and ends of human social life with theoretical consequences for the analysis of linguistic and cultural reproduction and change. This book argues that resonances emergent in the whole of multiparticipant, multimodal interaction, are organizational of human social-cognitive process important for understanding both the shape linguistic utterances take in interaction (dialogic resonance) and the relationships built between distinct sign modes (intermodal resonance). In this way, Saying and Doing in Zapotec develops a new theory, characterizing the logic of resonance in human interaction as semiotic process that connects and juxtaposes interactional moves into assemblages of relations, resonances and collaborations that build an emergent lifeworld for a language.
Download or read book Communication and Content written by Prashant Parikh and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences. "This book is the culmination of Prashant Parikh's long and deep work on fundamental questions of language and how they can be illuminated by game-theoretic analysis." — Roger Myerson, 2007 Nobel Laureate in Economics, University of Chicago "Prashant Parikh has, over the years, accumulated a substantial and impressive body of work on the nature of language, deploying the resources of game theory. Communication and content is a vastly ambitious culmination of this lifelong pursuit. It covers a tremendously wide range of themes and critically discusses an enormous range of writing on those themes from diverse intellectual traditions, as it systematically develops a game-theoretic account of content in the communicative contexts in which human linguistic capacities are employed, eschewing standard distinctions between semantics and pragmatics, and offering instead a highly integrated elaboration of the slogan “meaning is use”. It is a work that is at once creative yet conscientious, bold yet rigorously technical, systematic yet sensitive to contingency and context. It will abundantly reward close study." — Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University "Prashant Parikh has made fundamental contributions to the game-theoretic analysis of linguistic meaning. Communication and content summarizes and extends this important work, offering a truly novel approach to the strategic foundations of meaning. This approach finds a way out of the prison of methodological solipsism and opens up the study of linguistic meaning to scientific study." — Robin Clark, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania "A pioneering attempt to work out things like literal meaning, modulation, enrichment, implicature, etc. in mathematical detail within a game-theoretic framework." — François Recanati, Chair, Philosophy of Language and Mind, Collège de France "Communication and content is the crowning achievement of a long line of research pioneered by Prashant Parikh. In this groundbreaking work Parikh introduces a fresh perspective on natural language pragmatics, by making a creative tie with game theory. Clearly written, Communication and content weaves together semantics, game theory, and situation theory to create a thought-provoking picture of natural language pragmatics. Every modern AI researcher interested in the foundations of natural language pragmatics owes it to him- or herself to become familiar with this picture." — Yoav Shoham, Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Download or read book Referring expression generation in context written by Fahime Same and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2024-06-03 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reference production, often termed Referring Expression Generation (REG) in computational linguistics, encompasses two distinct tasks: (1) one-shot REG, and (2) REG-in-context. One-shot REG explores which properties of a referent offer a unique description of it. In contrast, REG-in-context asks which (anaphoric) referring expressions are optimal at various points in discourse. This book offers a series of in-depth studies of the REG-in-context task. It thoroughly explores various aspects of the task such as corpus selection, computational methods, feature analysis, and evaluation techniques. The comparative study of different corpora highlights the pivotal role of corpus choice in REG-in-context research, emphasizing its influence on all subsequent model development steps. An experimental analysis of various feature-based machine learning models reveals that those with a concise set of linguistically-informed features can rival models with more features. Furthermore, this work highlights the importance of paragraph-related concepts, an area underexplored in Natural Language Generation (NLG). The book offers a thorough evaluation of different approaches to the REG-in-context task (rule-based, feature-based, and neural end-to-end), and demonstrates that well-crafted, non-neural models are capable of matching or surpassing the performance of neural REG-in-context models. In addition, the book delves into post-hoc experiments, aimed at improving the explainability of both neural and classical REG-in-context models. It also addresses other critical topics, such as the limitations of accuracy-based evaluation metrics and the essential role of human evaluation in NLG research. These studies collectively advance our understanding of REG-in-context. They highlight the importance of selecting appropriate corpora and targeted features. They show the need for context-aware modeling and the value of a comprehensive approach to model evaluation and interpretation. This detailed analysis of REG-in-context paves the way for developing more sophisticated, linguistically-informed, and contextually appropriate NLG systems.
Download or read book Demonstratives in discourse written by Åshild Næss and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.
Download or read book Quantification and scales in change written by Remus Gergel and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains thematic papers on semantic change which emerged from the second edition of Formal Diachronic Semantics held at Saarland University. Its authorship ranges from established scholars in the field of language change to advanced PhD students whose contributions have equally qualified and have been selected after a two-step peer-review process. The key foci are variablity and diachronic trajectories in scale structures and quantification, but readers will also find a variety of further (and clearly non-disjoint) issues covered including reference, modality, givenness, presuppositions, alternatives in language change, temporality, epistemic indefiniteness, as well as - in more general terms - the interfaces of semantics with syntax, pragmatics and morphology. Given the nature of the field, the contributions are primarily based on original corpus studies (in one case also on synchronic experimental data) and present a series of new findings and theoretical analyses of several languages, first and foremost from the Germanic and Romance subbranches of Indo-European (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish) and from Semitic (with an analysis of universal quantification in Biblical Hebrew).
Download or read book Nominal anchoring written by Kata Balogh and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume address to different degrees issues on the relationship of articles systems and the pragmatic notions of definiteness and specificity in typologically diverse languages: Vietnamese, Siwi (Berber), Russian, Mopan (Mayan), Persian, Danish and Swedish. The main questions that motivate this volume are: How do languages with and without an article system go about helping the hearer to recognize whether a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific? Is there clear-cut semantic definiteness without articles or do we find systematic ambiguity regarding the interpretation of bare noun phrases? If there is ambiguity, can we still posit one reading as the default? What exactly do articles in languages encode that are not analyzed as straightforwardly coding (in)definiteness? Do we find linguistic tools in these languages that are similar to those found in languages without articles? Most contributions report on research on different corpora and elicited data or present the outcome of various experimental studies. One paper presents a diachronic study of the emergence of article systems. On the issue of how languages with and without articles guide the hearer to the conclusion that a given noun phrase should be interpreted as definite, specific or non-specific, the studies in this paper argue for similar strategies. The languages investigated in this volume use constructions and linguistic tools that receive a final interpretation based on discourse prominence considerations and various aspects of the syntax-semantics interface. In case of ambiguity between these readings, the default interpretation is given by factors (e. g., familiarity, uniqueness) that are known to contribute to the salience of phrases, but may be overridden by discourse prominence. Articles that do not straightforwardly mark (in)definiteness encode different kinds of specificity. In the languages studied in this volume, whether they have articles or do not have an article system, we find similar factors and linguistic tools in the calculation process of interpretations. The volume contains revised selected papers from the workshop entitled Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages held at the 40th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS), 7-9 March, 2018 at the University of Stuttgart.
Download or read book Analyzing Grammar written by Paul R. Kroeger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-05 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing Grammar is a clear introductory textbook on grammatical analysis, designed for students beginning to study the discipline. Covering both syntax (the structure of phrases and sentences) and morphology (the structure of words), it equips them with the tools and methods needed to analyze grammatical patterns in any language. Students are shown how to use standard notational devices such as phrase structure trees and word-formation rules, as well as prose descriptions. Emphasis is placed on comparing the different grammatical systems of the world's languages, and students are encouraged to practice the analyses through a diverse range of problem sets and exercises. Topics covered include word order, constituency, case, agreement, tense, gender, pronoun systems, inflection, derivation, argument structure and grammatical relations, and a useful glossary provides a clear explanation of each term. Accessibly written and comprehensive, Analyzing Grammar is set to become a key text for all courses in grammatical analysis.
Download or read book Developing Narrative Structure written by Allyssa McCabe and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Effective narration, the telling of stories or recounting of personal experiences, is an art requiring skills that appear crucial for children's language development and literacy acquisition. This volume serves an important purpose because it pulls together the widely scattered literature in the field, exploring the ways in which oral narrative structure develops in children and how it may be facilitated. It presents new empirical studies on genres of narrative, the role narrative structure plays in emergent literacy, the relationship between narrative language and autobiographical memory, and ways in which teachers and parents facilitate or hinder children's narrative development. The empirical research presented here draws from diverse groups, including Hispanic, African-American, and Anglo-American children from rural and urban America and Canada.
Download or read book What s a Cellphilm written by Katie MacEntee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What’s a Cellphilm? explores cellphone video production for its contributions to participatory visual research. There is a rich history of integrating participants’ videos into community-based research and activism. However, a reliance on camcorders and digital cameras has come under criticism for exacerbating unequal power relations between researchers and their collaborators. Using cellphones in participatory visual research suggests a new way forward by working with accessible, everyday technology and integrating existing media practices. Cellphones are everywhere these days. People use mobile technology to visually document and share their lives. This new era of democratised media practices inspired Jonathan Dockney and Keyan Tomaselli to coin the term cellphilm (cellphone + film). The term signals the coming together of different technologies on one handheld device and the emerging media culture based on people’s use of cellphones to create, share, and watch media. Chapters present practical examples of cellphilm research conducted in Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, the Netherlands and South Africa. Together these contributions consider several important methodological questions, such as: Is cellphilming a new research method or is it re-packaged participatory video? What theories inform the analysis of cellphilms? What might the significance of frequent advancements in cellphone technology be on cellphilms? How does our existing use of cellphones inform the research process and cellphilm aesthetics? What are the ethical dimensions of cellphilm use, dissemination, and archiving? These questions are taken up from interdisciplinary perspectives by established and new academic contributors from education, Indigenous studies, communication, film and media studies.
Download or read book Narrative Gravity written by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of 'real' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair's conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.
Download or read book Aztec Religion and Art of Writing written by Isabel Laack and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. "This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system." - Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University
Download or read book The Unbroken Thread written by Kathryn Klein and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Housed in the former 16th-century convent of Santo Domingo church, now the Regional Museum of Oaxaca, Mexico, is an important collection of textiles representing the area’s indigenous cultures. The collection includes a wealth of exquisitely made traditional weavings, many that are now considered rare. The Unbroken Thread: Conserving the Textile Traditions of Oaxaca details a joint project of the Getty Conservation Institute and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) of Mexico to conserve the collection and to document current use of textile traditions in daily life and ceremony. The book contains 145 color photographs of the valuable textiles in the collection, as well as images of local weavers and project participants at work. Subjects include anthropological research, ancient and present-day weaving techniques, analyses of natural dyestuffs, and discussions of the ethical and practical considerations involved in working in Latin America to conserve the materials and practices of living cultures.
Download or read book Demonstratives in discourse written by Åshild Næss and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.
Download or read book Transborder Lives written by Lynn Stephen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-13 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynn Stephen’s innovative ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca—the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle—who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many borders that these migrants repeatedly cross (including national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class borders and divisions), Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: She assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities. Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of both commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era—hierarchies that debase Mexico’s indigenous groups—are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grass-roots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.
