Download or read book Topicality and Representation written by Hammood Khalid Obaid and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the importance of topical reading in understanding Islamic figures and themes, and applies this approach to two landmark Elizabethan plays: George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar and William Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven. The former is the first English play to present a Moor as a major character, while the latter is the first English play to be based on Quranic material and feature the Prophet of Islam as a major character. In both plays, the book argues, topical concerns played a major role in the formation of Islamic characters and themes, rendering the term ‘representation’ highly debatable. The book also briefly covers other Elizabethan plays that contained Islamic elements, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. Topical issues covered in the work include British-Muslim relations, the Spanish Armada, Elizabethan patriotism in literature, Catholic-Protestant tensions in the late 16th century, the gynaecocracy debate, and Elizabethan alchemy and magic.

Download or read book Salience written by Christian Chiarcos and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salience refers to the prominence of information; salient items pop out and capture attention. This volume addresses the role of salience in discourse. It illustrates the range of multidisciplinary approaches - their diversities and similarities. The collection of papers covers a variety of research with different foci ranging from discourse entities, to discourse segments, to extra-linguistic factors.

Download or read book Advances in Information Retrieval written by Giambattista Amati and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-03-19 with total page 1553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2007, held in Rome, Italy in April 2007. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and design, efficiency, peer-to-peer networks, result merging, queries, relevance feedback, evaluation, classification and clustering, filtering, topic identification, expert finding, XML IR, Web IR, and multimedia IR.

Download or read book On Sentence Interpretation written by Lyn Frazier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1999-06-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory of how perceivers assign a grammatically-permissible interpretation to a sentence. Implicit in many investigations of language comprehension is the idea that each constituent of a sentence is interpreted by the perceiver at the earliest conceivable point, using all potentially relevant sources of information. A variety of counter examples are presented to argue against this implicit theory of sentence interpretation. It is argued that an explicit alternative theory is needed to specify which decisions are made at which points during interpretive processing and to spell out the principles governing the processor's preferred choice at points of ambiguity or uncertainty. Several specific issues are taken concerning how the processor assigns a focal structure to an input sentence, how it identifies the topic of the sentence, how implicit restrictors on the domain of quantification are interpreted and how the identification of the content of a restrictor may guide the processor's use of discourse information. Exploiting intuitions about preferred interpretations of ambiguous sentences as well as the results of both old and new experimental studies, a theory of the preferred interpretation of Determiner Phrases is presented. This work explores important, but overlooked questions in on-line sentence interpretation and attempts to erect some of the scaffolding for an eventual theory of sentence interpretation.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Reference written by Jeanette Gundel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook presents an overview of the phenomenon of reference - the ability to refer to and pick out entities - which is an essential part of human language and cognition. In the volume's 21 chapters, international experts in the field offer a critical account of all aspects of reference from a range of theoretical perspectives. Chapters in the first part of the book are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker - including speaker intentions - and of the addressee, as well as the role played by the semantics of the linguistic forms themselves in establishing reference. This part also explores the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity, and the conditions under which reference may fail. The second part of the volume looks at implications and applications, with chapters covering such topics as the acquisition of reference by children, the processing of reference both in the human brain and by machines. The volume will be of interest to linguists in a wide range of subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics, as well as scholars in related fields such as philosophy and computer science.

Download or read book Discourse and Pragmatics in Functional Grammar written by John H. Connolly and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contents of this volume are a selection from the papers given at the Sixth International Conference on Functional Grammar (ICFG), which was held in York, at the University College of Ripon and York St John, from 18 to 22 August, 1994. Functional Grammar as understood in the ICFGs and in this volume is the linguistic model as proposed by Simon Dik, and to date most extensively described and discussed in Dik (1989). The indebtedness of the FG-community to Simon Dik, who died six months after the conference was held, is great indeed. The editors hope that this volume is a fitting tribute to his work.

Download or read book Information Structure in Spoken Arabic written by Jonathan Owens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores speakers’ intentions, and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ, in spoken Arabic – which is different in many essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain linguistic structure in spoken Arabic. This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant parts of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world, including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation, the use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to understand the role of "disinformation" structure. The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives including pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and (de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book provides an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet understudied, component of spoken Arabic.

Download or read book Syntax written by T. Givón and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-07-19 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of Syntax: A functional-typological introduction is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of syntactic structure. With hindsight the author now finds the de-emphasis of the formal properties a somewhat regrettable choice, since it creates the false impression that one could somehow be a functionalist without being at the same time a structuralist. To redress the balance, explicit treatment is given to the core formal properties of syntactic constructions, such as constituency and hierarchy (phrase structure), grammatical relations and relational control, clause union, finiteness and governed constructions. At the same time, the cognitive and communicative underpinning of grammatical universals are further elucidated and underscored, and the interplay between grammar, cognition and neurology is outlined. Also the relevant typological database is expanded, now exploring in greater precision the bounds of syntactic diversity. Lastly, Syntax treats synchronic-typological diversity more explicitly as the dynamic by-product of diachronic development or grammaticalization. In so doing a parallel is drawn between linguistic diversity and diachrony on the one hand and biological diversity and evolution on the other. It is then suggested that — as in biology — synchronic universals of grammar are exercised and instantiated primarily as constraints on development, and are thus merely the apparent by-products of universal constraints on grammaticalization.

Download or read book Topic Focus and Foreground in Ancient Hebrew Narratives written by Jean-Marc Heimerdinger and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1999-08-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study breaks new ground in describing how various linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms affect both the form of the narrative clause and the arrangement of the grammatical elements. The various possible forms that a narrative clause can take are classified in terms of their 'topic-comment' and 'focus-presupposition', and it is argued that the way in which these are articulated dictates the word order in the clause. The outcome of the study demonstrates that the traditional binary distinction between foreground and background, based purely on verb forms, is inadequate. A new model is offered showing how foregrounding is achieved by exploiting cognitive structures or by using specific evaluative devices.

Download or read book Information Structure and its Interfaces written by Lunella Mereu and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume presents recent results in the field of Information Structure based on research on Italian and Italian dialects, and on further studies on several typologically different languages. The central idea is that Information Structure is not an exclusive matter of syntax but an interface issue which involves the interplay of at least the phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic levels of analysis. In addition, the volume is based on the study of actual language use and it adopts a cross-linguistic point of view.

Download or read book Advances in Information Retrieval written by Mounia Lalmas and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-04-05 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2006, held in London, April 2006. The 37 revised full papers and 28 revised poster papers presented are organized in topical sections on formal models, document and query representation and text understanding, topic identification and news retrieval, clustering and classification, refinement and feedback, performance and peer-to-peer networks, Web search, cross-language retrieval, genomic IR, and much more.

Download or read book Verbs written by William Croft and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a model of event structure for the analysis of aspectual constructions and argument structure constructions in English and other languages. Representing the culmination of two decades of the author's research and thought, it explores the contribution of semantics to the argument-structure and tense-aspect constructions in which verbs occur, integrating the aspectual and causal structures of events. The argument is framed in relation to current and previous scholarship and takes full account of diachronic and usage-based research. Professor Croft's analysis encompasses the full range of English verb classes and is enriched throughout by a strong typological dimension: the syntax and semantics of verbs are always seen from a crosslinguistic perspective. This allows the author to demonstrate the generality of his theory and to show how it breaks new ground in predicting and explaining linguistic facts. The subject of the book is at the heart of current work in syntax and semantics and the interface between them. It will interest semanticists, syntacticians and cognitive and functional-typological linguists. The transparency of the author's style and his avoidance of theory-dependent constructs will extend its appeal to linguists of all theoretical stripes.

Download or read book Architecture of Topic written by Valéria Molnár and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains innovative papers that target the linguistic status of topic at the interface between grammar and discourse. The purpose of the volume is to discuss the universal properties of topics and, at the same time, to document the range of discourse-semantic and grammatical variation within this phenomenon in European languages. The volume is structured accordingly: (i) theoretical foundations of topicality in grammar and discourse; (ii) discourse-semantic correlates of topicality; (iii) variation in the grammatical (external and internal) encoding of topicality; (iv) topics from the diachronic perspective. The articles take different perspectives, including contrastive studies of modern languages, studies on diachronic development, and typological generalizations. They also take into consideration various types of empirical data – introspective data, semi-spontaneously produced data, experimental data and language corpora. The articles in this volume show that the concept of topic is necessary for the description and explanation of a number of discourse-semantic phenomena. They present a state of the art account of the architecture of topic while making recent research on the phenomenon accessible to a wider readership.

Download or read book Social Computing and Social Media written by Adela Coman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-08 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set LNCS 14025 and 14026 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, held in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The SCSM 2023 conference offers a wide range of topics related to the design, development, assessment, use, and impact of social media.

Download or read book Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics written by Michael Darnell and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-03-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 23rd UWM Linguistics Symposium (1996) brought together linguists of opposing theoretical approaches — functionalists and formalists — in order to determine to what extent these approaches really differ from each other and to what extent the approaches complement each other. The two volumes of Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics contain a careful selection of the papers originally presented at the symposium. Volume I includes papers discussing the two basic approaches to linguistics; with contributions by: Werner Abraham, Stephen R. Anderson, Joan L. Bybee, William Croft, Alice Davidson, Mark Durie, Ken Hale, Michael Hammond, Bruce P. Hayes, Nina Hyams, Howard Lasnik, Brian MacWhinney, Geoffrey S. Nathan, Daniell Nettle, Frederick J. Newmeyer, Edith A. Moravcsik, Doris Payne, Janet Pierrehumbert, Kathleen M. Wheatley. Volume II consists of case studies which draw upon the strengths of both approaches and thus help to bridge the gap between the two camps; with contributions by: Mira Ariel, Melissa Axelrod, Robbin Clamons, Bernard Comrie, Kees Hengeveld, Erika Hoff-Ginsberg, James Hurford, Lizanne Kaiser, Nicholas Kibre, Simon Kirby, Feng-hsi Liu, André Meinunger , Viola Miglio, Ann Mulkern, Waturu Nakamura, Maria Polinsky, Elizabeth Purnell, Gerald Sanders, Nancy Stenson, Maggie Tallerman, Ronnie Wilbur.

Download or read book Automated Essay Scoring written by Beata Beigman Klebanov and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the state of the art of automated essay scoring, its challenges and its potential. One of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence to language data (along with machine translation and speech recognition), automated essay scoring has evolved to become both a revenue-generating industry and a vast field of research, with many subfields and connections to other NLP tasks. In this book, we review the developments in this field against the backdrop of Elias Page's seminal 1966 paper titled "The Imminence of Grading Essays by Computer." Part 1 establishes what automated essay scoring is about, why it exists, where the technology stands, and what are some of the main issues. In Part 2, the book presents guided exercises to illustrate how one would go about building and evaluating a simple automated scoring system, while Part 3 offers readers a survey of the literature on different types of scoring models, the aspects of essay quality studied in prior research, and the implementation and evaluation of a scoring engine. Part 4 offers a broader view of the field inclusive of some neighboring areas, and Part \ref{part5} closes with summary and discussion. This book grew out of a week-long course on automated evaluation of language production at the North American Summer School for Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI), attended by advanced undergraduates and early-stage graduate students from a variety of disciplines. Teachers of natural language processing, in particular, will find that the book offers a useful foundation for a supplemental module on automated scoring. Professionals and students in linguistics, applied linguistics, educational technology, and other related disciplines will also find the material here useful.

Download or read book Political Representation in the European Union written by Sandra Kröger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the financial and economic crisis of 2008–9 has progressed into an equally important political and democratic crisis of the EU. These troubled times have set the framework to re-assess a number of important questions in regard to representative democracy in the EU, such as the normative foundation of political representation, the institutional relationship between representatives and represented, the link between democracy and representation and new arenas and actors. This book examines the diverse avenues through which different sorts of actors have expressed their voices during the Euro crisis and how their various interests are translated into the decision-making process. It offers a state-of- the-art assessment of what political representation means in this context as well as a contribution to the ‘representative turn’ in democratic theory. The authors address three key themes: • The main actors and channels of political representation in the EU. • Interlocking levels of representation in the EU and the way in which national and supranational representation works. • How the European institutional system represents EU citizens through law and administration. Focusing on the importance of representation in the legitimation of democracy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, European studies, democratic theory, representation studies, civil society and transnational democracy.