Semantics and Pragmatics Commons^™

Cohesion And Coherence Shifts In Chinese Argumentative Texts Translated From English., Soh Bee Kwee

Student Works (2010-2019)

this study focuses on the shifts of cohesion and coherence in argumentative texts translated from English into Chinese.  This  research aims to substantiate theoretical assumptions by testing them against authentic data. Firstly, the study discusses the shift of cohesion by comparing the use of third person pronoun and conjunction based on the bottom-up approach proposed by Baker (1992). Secondly, it shows how micro-level coherence affects macro-level coherence of argumentative texts in terms of text-type. Adopting Hatim and Mason’s text-type model (1990), this study highlights the ways in which overall discoursal relations evolve in the 29 unit ‘texts’ used as data. …

Conversational Skills Of An Autistic Teenager : A Pragmatic Analysis., Che An Abdul Ghani

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study aimed to analyze the conversational skills of an autistic teenager. The sample of this study was a 16 year old male autistic boy; and was referred to a Y in this study. He was verbal and had completed primary school education and at the time of the study he was attending a special education program. He speaks English and Malay, able to read and write in both languages fairly and has high cognitive ability. He is considered relatively intelligent by his teachers and his therapists. This study engaged three theories as its framework. They were Grice’s Theory (l975), …

Strategi Tanya-Jawab Dalam Bilik Darjah : Satu Analisia Pragmatik., Woon Chee Chee

Student Works (2010-2019)

This study analyzed pragmatically on the usage of Malay Language in classrooms’ question-answer contexts. The study focused on main question-answer strategies used by the lecturers and the students of Ungku Omar Polytechnic during five sampled sessions of teaching and learning. This research report explicitly revealed some significantly unique sequences of question-answer throughout the whole data, to be analyzed based on Searle’s felicity conditions specified in the Speech Act Theory (1969). The methodology of observation, note-jotting, and audio recordings were used to gather data in the study. Five sessions of teaching and learning in Pendidikan Moral were recorded and transcribed based …

A Study Of Epistemic Modality In A Television Interview., Papiya Chakrabarty

Student Works (2010-2019)

This research explores the use of modals such as will, would and shall which are epistemic in nature in an interview from America’s MTP (Meet the Press) of the present millennium which involves five politicians as speakers. It applies a qualitative approach and is a corpus based lexico-grammatical research which plans to identify the modality and its frequency in only one type of discourse. The research tests aims to test why speakers use epistemic modality and how committed they are towards their views, opinions which become truth propositions when involved in a question and answer session with other participants of …

Applying Computational Models Of Spatial Prepositions To Visually Situated Dialog, John D. Kelleher, Fintan Costello

Articles

This article describes the application of computational models of spatial prepositions to visually situated dialog systems. In these dialogs, spatial prepositions are important because people often use them to refer to entities in the visual context of a dialog. We first describe a generic architecture for a visually situated dialog system and highlight the interactions between the spatial cognition module, which provides the interface to the models of prepositional semantics, and the other components in the architecture. Following this, we present two new computational models of topological and projective spatial prepositions. The main novelty within these models is the fact …

The Language Of Consent In Police Encounters, Janice Nadler, J.D. Trout

Faculty Working Papers

In this chapter, we examine the nature of conversations in citizen-police encounters in which police seek to conduct a search based on the citizen's consent. We argue that when police officers ask a person if they can search, citizens often feel enormous pressure to say yes. But judges routinely ignore these pressures, choosing instead to spotlight the politeness and restraint of the officers' language and demeanor. Courts often analyze the language of police encounters as if the conversation has an obvious, context-free meaning. The pragmatic features of language influence behavior, but courts routinely ignore or deny this fact. Instead, current …

Introduction: Humor In Contemporary American Poetry, Denise Duhamel, Salvatore Attardo

Faculty Publications

Introduction piece to a special issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research.

Second Occurrence Focus And The Acoustics Of Prominence, Jonathan Howell

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Partee (1991) challenged the significance of the observation that certain adverbs (e.g., only) reliably associate with phonologically prominent words to truth‐conditional effect, noting second occurrence (i.e., repeated or given) focus (SOF) appears to lack a phonological realization. Rooth (1996), Bartels (2004), Beaver et al. (2004), Jaeger (2004), and Fry and Ishihara (2005) argued that, while not intonationally prominent, an SOF word can be marked by increased duration and/or increased rms intensity. An acoustic study of verb‐noun homophone pairs is reported. Three sophisticated speakers uttered five repetitions of the targets, embedded in discourses, in first occurrence (FOF), SOF, and unfocused (NF) …

Development Of Interactional Competence: Changes In The Use Of Ne In L2 Japanese During Study Abroad, Midori Ishida

Faculty Publications

This chapter investigates the development of the use of the Japanese particle ne by a second language (L2) learner of Japanese during a 9-month study abroad.

Web 2.0, Synthetic Immersive Environments, And Mobile Resources For Language Education, Julie M. Sykes, Ana Oskoz, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In light of the increasingly blurred line between mediated and nonmediated contexts for social, professional, and educational purposes, attention to the presence and use of innovative digital media is critical to the consideration of the future of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). This article reviews current trends in the use of mediated communication and offers a vision for near-future second and foreign language (L2) learning that utilizes emerging media as (a) meaningful contexts for L2 language development and (b) a means for adding real world relevance to in-class uses of internet-mediated communication tools. In this article, we first explore a sampling …

A Constitutional Conundrum Of Second Amendment Commas, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Publications

Prompted by the court’s decision in Parker v. District of Columbia, this series of correspondence discusses the effect possible forms of punctuation may have on the Second Amendment. The article makes comments on the important grammars during the founding and also two possible writings of the Second Amendment that contain different sets of punctuation.

Proceedings Of The 4th Acl-Sigsem Workshop On Prepositions At Acl-2007., Fintan Costello, John D. Kelleher, Martin Volk

Conference papers

This volume contains the papers presented at the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions. This workshop is endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (ACL-SIGSEM), and is hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, taking place on 28th June, 2007 in Prague, the Czech Republic.

A Constitutional Conundrum Of Second Amendment Commas: A Short Epistolary Report, William W. Van Alstyne

Faculty Scholarship

Prompted by the court’s decision in Parker v. District of Columbia, this series of correspondence discusses the effect possible forms of punctuation may have on the Second Amendment. The article makes comments on the important grammars during the founding and also two possible writings of the Second Amendment that contain different sets of punctuation.

Interactional Competence And The Use Of Modal Expressions In Decision-Making Activities: Ca For Understanding Microgenesis Of Pragmatic Competence, Midori Ishida

Faculty Publications

Interlanguage pragmatics (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993) is a research area that is concerned with what second language (L2) learners do with the target language, and how their competence in using the language develops over time. However, until 1996 when Kasper and Schmidt put out agendas for more developmentally oriented investigations, research on interlanguage pragmatics had been predominated by studies focusing on the former, L2 use at a point in time. This research area has matured more by now in the area of developmental interlanguage pragmatics, as reviewed in Kasper and Rose (2002). Along with an increased attention to longitudinal development …

A Computational Model Of The Referential Semantics Of Projective Prepositions, John D. Kelleher, Josef Van Genabith

Conference papers

In this paper we present a framework for interpreting locative expressions containing the prepositions in front of and behind. These prepositions have different semantics in the viewer-centred and intrinsic frames of reference (Vandeloise, 1991). We define a model of their semantics in each frame of reference. The basis of these models is a novel parameterized continuum function that creates a 3-D spatial template. In the intrinsic frame of reference the origin used by the continuum function is assumed to be known a priori and object occlusion does not impact on the applicability rating of a point in the spatial template. …

Proximity In Context: An Empirically Grounded Computational Model Of Proximity For Processing Topological Spatial Expression., John D. Kelleher, Geert-Jan Kruijff, Fintan Costello

Conference papers

The paper presents a new model for context-dependent interpretation of linguistic expressions about spatial proximity between objects in a natural scene. The paper discusses novel psycholinguistic experimental data that tests and verifies the model. The model has been implemented, and enables a conversational robot to identify objects in a scene through topological spatial relations (e.g. ''X near Y''). The model can help motivate the choice between topological and projective prepositions.

Nl-Soar Update, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Innovating Superheroes, Alvise Mattozzi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Introduction]

Superhero comics have changed. They have passed through a Golden Age and Silver Age, they have been transformed, cancelled, revived, killed, deconstructed, reconstructed, revisited, etc. My aim is to account for part of these changes and show how superhero comics have been innovated. In order to track these changes I chose to compare different versions of a few DC Comics series, such as Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Shade, that had been cancelled and then revived and are known to have introduced relevant changes between the earliest and the subsequent versions.

Before tackling the series mentioned, I …

Jeux De Miroirs : Kourouma L'Interprete?, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Critics have often tended to show how Ahmadou Kourouma has expressed the disillusionment of the African "suns of the independences," ''tropicalized" the French language by bending its syntax to fit that of Malinke, and produced novels for "occidental importation" on the basis of oral texts. From a standpoint of sociopragmatics, in contradistinction, I would like to detail the internal specificity of Kourouma's fictional text by its means of production by analyzing it with respect to its cycle of production in terms of strategies, the writer's itinerary, its placement at the center of the literary field, etc. In addition, I will …

Machine Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory : An Evaluative Study, Yvonne Hwee Hong Yeo

Student Works (2000-2009)

This study evaluates the efficacy of machine translation (MT) in domains where MT is not conventionally used, that is, in non-technical domains where the subject matters involve human, social and/or societal phenomena. The ultimate purpose of this endeavor is to assess the capacity of MT in dealing with the phenomenon of 'context' as well as utterance interpretation. The evaluation endeavor is twofold, consisting of evaluation of MT product and evaluation of MT process, with the latter being the main focus. Such evaluation is carried out through comparison between human translation corpora (HT product) and machine translation corpora (MT product). This …

Analisis Tautan Dan Runtutan Dalam Teks Klasik Dan Moden, Hasnah Mat Adnan

Student Works (2000-2009)

Research in this field has touched beyond grammatical barrier, which is specification of traditional about Malay discourse and modern type. The to two main aspects, being the base of text, which are cohesion and coherence will be the main focus in this investigation. One who investigates the aspect of cohesion without studying the aspect of coherence in a discourse is not complete as both are linked to one another. Although both are different concepts, they are revealing continuous interplay at the level of textual structure. Cohesion, being the form and coherence as the function of meaning should not be ignored …

Stereotypes In The Language Of Beauty Product Advertisements, J.R. Shanmugam

Student Works (2000-2009)

This study focuses on the connotative language used in printed facial and slimming advertisements, which may be adhering to any common stereotypes of tile ideal Malaysian beauty in terms of complexion and figure or body weight. It was found that beauty product advertisements do convey a stereotypical beauty to the potential consumer. This so-called ideal beauty has a fair and youthful-looking complexion and a slim figure However, this stereotypical beauty is only implied subtly through the advertisement The research methodology has been carried out in 4 stages Stage 1 consisted of mere extraction of words from the advertisements Stage 2 …

Kajian Diakronik Penterjemahan Istilah Biologi : Satu Analisis Morfologi Semantik, Hasnah Mohamad

Student Works (2000-2009)

This is a diachronic study of scientific terminology, which discusses changes in biological terminology after 20 years. Changes are viewed from the morphological and semantic aspects and the relationship between them. The research also determines the existence of specific patterns of linguistic change and whether they have differences in the variety of language form used in the two different time periods. A text analysis approach is used and the study is limited to written material as it is well documented and easier to obtain. Data was collected from, b:tilah Kajihayat, Perhul

Pemerolehan Dan Penguasaan Bahasa Di Kalangan Kanak-Kanak, Noor Azmira Mohamed

Student Works (2000-2009)

Kajian dilakukan untuk melihat tahap pemerolehan dan penguasaan bahasa di kalangan kanak-kanak yang berusia 2.6 tahun dan 3.7 tahun berdasarkan analisis am, analisis sintaksis dan semantik bahasa Melayu. Kedua-­dua sampel merupakan kanak-kanak Melayu yang mempunyai latar belakang bahasa yang sama iaitu dilahirkan dan dibesarkan di Kelantan. Oleh itu bahasa pertama kedua-dua mereka ialah bahasa Melayu dialek Kelantan. Oleh kerana kedua-dua sampel yang dipilih terdiri daripada kanak-kanak Melayu yang dibesarkan dalam masyarakat Melayu dan menggunakan bahasa Melayu sebagai bahasa pertama dalam sebarang bentuk perhubungan, maka analisis bagi melihat tahap pemerolehan dan penguasaan bahasa di kalangan mereka juga akan dilakukan berdasarkan aspek-aspek …

Pengendalian Kata Ganda Dalam Kamus Dewan Dan Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia : Satu Kajian Perbandingan, Ibrahim Ahmad

Student Works (2000-2009)

This descriptive comparative study is to find out the similarities and differences in the use of reduplication forms in KD and KBBI. The intertext approach in this study chooses KD and KBBJ as they are regarded as the most authoritative and renowned monolingual dictionaries which becomes a main source of references for vocabulary and linguistic inputs. This study is focused on two major aspects, namely the entry status and the meaning description. The entry status deals with the status of the reduplication forms in the dictionary either as a lemma, sublemma, precategories form. phrase, variant, polysemy, or cross-reference. This also …

Analisis Ayat Berpredikat Frasa Kerja : Satu Pendekatan Tata Bahasa Kasus, Samsur Rijal Yahaya

Student Works (2000-2009)

Disertasi ini mengungkapkan struktur ayat berfrasa kerja dalam bahasa Malaysia. Untuk menjabarkannya, digunakan Teori Tata Bahasa Kasus yang dipelopori oleh Charles Fillmore. Penelitian ini menggunakan data yang dikumpulkan dari sebuah novel iaitu Menrouw Toga yang ditulis oleh Sasterawan Negara Arena Wati. Penulis mengumpulkan data melalui metode catatan tentang satuan tematis. Pada tahap analisis data, telah digunakan metode distribusional dengan teknik substitu si, delesi, dan ekspansi. Kemudian metode distribusional ini digabungkan pula dengan teknik lmmideate Constituens (ICs). lmplikasi dan pengaplikasian Teori Tata Bahasa Kasus ini, suatu ayat terdiri atas proposisi. Proposisi terbahagi kepada Verba dan Argumen-argumennya. Argumen-argumen inilah yang diberi label …

A Study Of The Variant Forms Of Chinese Characters In Jiyun, Lye Hin Lee

Student Works (2000-2009)

This thesis attempts to give an initial etymological, semantics and phonological analysis of the variant forms of the Chinese characters found in a phonology lexicon, Jiyun. The focus of this study is on the comparison among the above-mentioned variant forms and the relevant scripts listed in the ancient Chinese etymological and phonological works, namely, Erya (EY), Shuowen Jiezi (SW), Fangyan (FY), Guangya (GYa), Yupian (YP), Longkan shuojing (LKSJ), Guangyun (GY) and other classical literary works. In the introduction, a brief elaboration of JY with its praises and disparages by the scholars through the ages is given, followed by the scope …

Perkamusan Melayu : Sumbangan Data Korpus Berkomputer, Norliza Haji Jamaluddin

Student Works (2000-2009)

This study is on the definition aspect in Malay lexicography with the focus on kamus Melayu Inqqeris Dewan. The definition aspect being discussed in this thesis is on the way the definition is done based on the COBUILD definition practice. The elaboration of every word entry is based on the analysis of the computer corpus data. There are six chapters in this thesis . The first chapter provides the background of the study, the objectives, scope and methodology. Chapter II is on the lexicographic convention and definition practice by the COBUILD and kamus Dewan projects. Chapter III presents the computer …

Struggle, Aspiration, And Obsession: The Discourse Of Diet, Emily K. L. Jahn

Masters Theses

Research has shown that members of society are generally dissatisfied with their current weight. This study examines how individuals socially construct meanings of the word diet and the dieting process. Participants (n=443) were males and females who ranged in age from 7 to 68. Each were given a diet questionnaire to complete. The older groups were given the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC) Scale in addition to the survey. The text for analysis was obtained by the surveys and four focus groups. The resulting data indicated that both males and females perceive the word diet means "to lose weight." …

The Effect Of Usage On Degrees Of Constituency: The Reduction Of Don't In English, Joan Bybee, Joanne Scheibman

English Faculty Publications

In this paper we take the position that there are many degrees of constituency and that these derive in a direct manner from the frequency with which elements are used together: elements that are frequently found next to each other show a tighter constituent structure than those that collocate less frequently. We use both phonological and functional evidence from conversation to argue that repetition conditions chunking (Haiman 1994), sometimes overriding the syntactic and semantic logic of the organization of utterances. Our study examines the reduction of don't in American English conversation. We find that don't is reduced the most in …