Linguistic Analysis Techniques Research Articles

Lexical Construction of Character Names in the Collection of Short Stories "Robohnya Surau Kami" By A.A. Navis

This research aims to analyze the lexical construction in the short story collection "Robohnya Surau Kami" by A.A. Navis. The lexical construction that is focused on is the lexical construction of the characters in the short story collection. This research uses a descriptive qualitative approach and a corpus linguistics approach. The corpus linguistic application used in this research is the KORTARA application (Korpus Nusantara). The data collection technique used in this research is documentation techniques, which are sourced from the corpus. The documentation technique used in this research comes from the corpus files contained in the corpus linguistic application (Korpus Nusantara). The corpus target of this research is a short stories corpus. This research uses computational linguistic analysis techniques. The computational linguistic technique in this research goes through several stages, namely identification, classification, interpretation and conclusion Based on the research that has been carried out, several types of character construction have been obtained, namely (1) gender terms, (2) kinship terms in Indonesian, (3) kinship terms in Minangkabau, (4) personal names, (5) country names, (6) common nouns , (7) creator/creator, (8) formal profession/position title, (9) non-formal profession/position title, and (10) pronoun.

AI YOUTUBE VIDEO SUMMARY USING NLP

The "AI YouTube Video Summary using NLP" project introduces an innovative solution to the burgeoning challenge of digesting vast amounts of video content on platforms like YouTube. With the exponential growth of online video, users often face time constraints and information overload, hindering their ability to extract valuable insights efficiently. Our project addresses this issue by harnessing the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically generate concise summaries of YouTube videos. Through a seamless integration with the MERN stack, our system enables users to input video URLs and receive summaries in three distinct forms: short, long, and key insights. By automating the process of transcript extraction, linguistic analysis, and summarization, our system streamlines content consumption, offering users a time-saving and effective method for accessing essential information. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and linguistic analysis techniques, our system accurately identifies and distills key themes, concepts, and insights embedded within the video content. This empowers users to gain comprehensive understanding without the need for exhaustive viewing, thereby enhancing their browsing experience and knowledge acquisition. In essence, the "AI YouTube Video Summary using NLP" project represents a significant advancement in content consumption methodologies, offering a practical solution to the challenges posed by the proliferation of video content online. Through our innovative approach, we aim to revolutionize the way users engage with YouTube videos, facilitating efficient information extraction and empowering them to make the most of their online viewing experience. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Summarization, Multimedia Content Analysis, Automatic Summarization.

Kortara: The Process of Forming Acronyms on Indonesian Military Academy Corpus

This study aims to examine the process of forming acronyms on the Indonesian military academy corpus in KORTARA using a corpus linguistics approach. The method used is a descriptive corpus linguistic approach. The data source for this research is the Akmil blog website which is accessed through the linguistic application Korpus Nusantara (Korpus Nusantara) on the page https://korpusnusantara.fbs.unp.ac.id/. The data collection technique used in this research is the documentation technique, which analyzes the target data in the form of corpus files in KORTARA (Korpus Nusantara). This study used computational linguistic analysis techniques for the linguistic application of the KORTARA corpus (Korpus Nusantara). Based on the research that has been done, 723 acronym data were obtained on the Akmil blog website. The 723 acronyms include combining syllables (29 data), combining syllables with letters (334 data), combining letters with letters (357 data), combining syllables with words (2 data), and combining letters with words (1 data). This study also discovered the process of forming new acronyms, in the form of combining letters with words.

Paremia with the word for the designation of natural phenomena in the terms of the naive picture of the ukrainian people's world.

The national spiritual treasures of the people include the language, which reflects its outlook, psychics, lifestyle, traditions, culture, rituals and beliefs - all that reproduces the soul of the people and determines the national mentality. The language finds verbal means of characterizing the most diverse phenomena of life, bright in content and form in paremias. Proverbs and sayings are the generalized memory of the people and the result of their observations of life and natural phenomena, which enables the younger generation to formulate views on ethics, morality, history and politics. The topicality of scientific research is determined by the need to study the linguistic specificity of paremiological units in the aspect of the textual organization of this genre as part of the spiritual culture of the Ukrainian nation, which preserves the memory of the people and observations of life and natural phenomena. The purpose of our article is to analyze the linguistic features of paremias with the reference word for nature, in particular, their semantic organization and thematic groups. The following methods and techniques of linguistic analysis are used in the article: system-functional analysis, component method, contextual-interpretive method, method of stylistic analysis. The scientific novelty of the research consists in deepening the knowledge about paremias, in the analysis of the semantic nature of proverbs and sayings, taking into account the means of artistic expression. Conclusions. The analyzed material proves that in the minds of our ancestors, each primary element corresponded to a certain element: water was associated with space, fire with soul, earth with time, air with wisdom. According to the semantics, we distinguished three groups of paremias with a reference word for the designation of nature: observation of nature; paremias with generalizing meaning; didactic paremias. However, paremias with a reference word for nature have different degrees of generalization. It has been studied that proverbs about the seasons are often used in their literal meaning, without subtext or excessive artistic imagery, but there are some that have several meanings. We see the perspective of further research in the analysis of communicative and pragmatic features of Ukrainian paremias.

Квота в юридической науке и законодательстве: постановка проблемы исследования

In the work, the author attempts to comprehend and obtain new scientific knowledge about the quota as a general legal phenomenon. The modern legal and linguistic construction of the quota is analyzed, its analysis is carried out from the perspective of both the general social and legal components. Based on the study of legal doctrine, domestic legislation, and law enforcement practice, the author hypothesizes that the quota is a universal legal regulator combining stimulating, encouraging, and restrictive functional effects. The thesis about the need to study quotas from general theoretical positions as an institution of law and legislation is proved. Using various methodological tools, including linguistic analysis techniques, as well as formal-legal, systematic approaches, the author proposes a definition of this phenomenon, substantiates individual essential features. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that with the help of quotas, a balance is achieved between the general regulatory and protective legal impact of the state on public relations. It is argued that the mechanism of quotas combines the potential of restrictions as a means of restraining the development of public relations unfavorable for society and the state, and in addition — stimulating, by encouraging socially acceptable, useful behavior and its result.

Theatre for All

At the crossroads of ESL education and drama there lies a relatively unexplored issue facing schools. Little research exists proposing and examining the efficacy of pedagogy designed to serve students without an English-as-a-first-language background. Through the lens of Ontario’s education system wherein students of all language backgrounds are expected to learn together in subject classrooms, the impacts of existing ESL focused pedagogy were tested in this mixed environment. Using existing linguistic analysis techniques focused around rhythm and pause, the development of students’ performance of dramatic text who followed this pedagogy was measured against a control group in an attempt to ascertain whether this pedagogy has merit in the classroom, and what still needs to be done to create more inclusive and effective drama classrooms in the province of Ontario.

Heterogeneity of signs and classification criteria for compound words

The purpose of the article is to draw attention to the fact of the development of compositology in languages of different grammatical structures and in the Iberian-Caucasian in particular. We used classification, descriptive methods, linguistic analysis techniques, which are widely used by all researchers who work with the material of specific languages or linguistic groups. The method of typological comparison used in this study should be especially highlighted, which confirms the sufficient efficiency when comparing languages of different genetic and structural affiliation. The main and easily established difference when comparing the word-formation systems of the Chechen and Russian, for example, languages, is that in the Chechen language, of the two main ways of forming words (word production and base formation), the second clearly predominates. The reliance of the Chechen word-formation on the basis is not a new phenomenon and not a specificity of the Chechen language. It is known that in many languages, word-formation affixes historically go back to the components of additions. Consequently, compounding precedes affixation. Composites in Nakh languages ​​go back to syntactic combinations of words and the most acceptable for the Chechen language is the classification according to the method of their formation.

Discovery Model Based on Analogies for Teaching Computer Programming

Teaching the fundamentals of computer programming in a first course (CS1) is a complex activity for the professor and is also a challenge for them. Nowadays, there are several teaching strategies for dealing with a CS1 at the university, one of which is the use of analogies to support the abstraction process that a student needs to carry for the appropriation of fundamental concepts. This article presents the results of applying a discovery model that allowed for the extraction of patterns, linguistic analysis, textual analytics, and linked data when using analogies for teaching the fundamental concepts of programming by professors in a CS1 in university programs that train software developers. For that reason, a discovery model based on machine learning and text mining was proposed using natural language processing techniques for semantic vector space modeling, distributional semantics, and the generation of synthetic data. The discovery process was carried out using nine supervised learning methods, three unsupervised learning methods, and one semi-supervised learning method involving linguistic analysis techniques, text analytics, and linked data. The main findings showed that professors include keywords, which are part of the technical computer terminology, in the form of verbs in the statement of the analogy and combine them in quantitative contexts with neutral or positive phrases, where numerical examples, cooking recipes, and games were the most used categories. Finally, a structure is proposed for the construction of analogies to teach programming concepts and this was validated by the professors and students.

Communicative and pragmatic features of dramatic text as a kind of artistic speech

The article formulates the theoretical foundations of the study of dramatic text, distinguishes between the concepts of “dramatic text” (affects the reader) and “dramatic work” (verbalizes the theatrical action for the viewer), because these linguistic realities are in the relationship of inclusion. A dramatic text is a unity organized according to certain laws, which has a clear structure: a certain number of lines, designed with the help of the author's remark, forms a dialogical unity; the combination of dialogic units forms a scene; the set of scenes constitute an act; several acts create a complete work. Obligatory factors of expressiveness of the dramatic text that influence the development of dialogic parts of the characters are pragmatic components of speech which are considered as certain rules of successful communication. In the communicative-pragmatic paradigm dramatic text is defined as a specific type of artistic text that has its own structural and speech features due to a combination of informational, pragmatic, stylistic and cognitive aspects, where the pragmatic aspect is found in speech acts, syntactic organization of cues. The scientific novelty of the research is DT of Bukovinian’s writers of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century that have not yet been the subject of analysis. The relevance of scientific research requires a holistic analysis of the dramatic text and difference between the concepts of “dramatic text” and “dramatic composition”, the study of mandatory factors of expressiveness of dramatic text, influencing the development of dialogic parts. The following methods and techniques of linguistic analysis are used in the article: system-functional analysis, method of discussion analysis, contextual-interpretive method. Conclusions. Dramatic text is a complex phenomenon with its own peculiarities of functioning. It is possible to penetrate into the structure of a dramatic text, to reveal the meaning of the author's intentions due to the volume-pragmatic division of the text. The communicative-pragmatic organization of DT influences the processes of active aesthetic influence of a work of art on the consciousness of the addressee. We see the prospect of the represented research in the further deepening of knowledge about the categorical features of the text in the communicative-pragmatic aspect.

Особливості формування та перекладу термінології клінічної ветеринарної гематології

Abstract. The article deals with the peculiarities of the formation, systematization and translation of Veterinary Hematology terminology. Introduction. At this stage, the processes of development and formation of veterinary terminology, lexical and semantic features of veterinary terms, functional features of veterinary scientific text are studied in sufficient detail, a typology of term systems in veterinary medicine is proposed, and methodological approaches to its study are determined. However, most scientific works relate specifically to anatomical and histological terminology, which is a morphological terminological formation of the anatomical and histological structure of organs and tissues of the animal body in normal and pathological conditions. This terminology is well-established, international and used by veterinarians all over the world. However, there is a significant difference between anatomical and histological terminology and nomenclature and clinical terminology, which is expressed by grammatical, lexical and semantic features. Therefore, the study of terminology in certain areas of veterinary science requires further detailed study. Purpose. The aim of our work was to study the lexical and structural features of the terminology of clinical veterinary hematology, to determine the main difficulties and ways of its reproduction in English-Ukrainian translations. Methods. To achieve this goal, a set of methods was used, in particular the method of analysis for comparing and comparing the views of various scientists in the field of studying veterinary terminology; descriptive method with methods of observation, comparison and classification; methods and techniques of linguistic analysis; transformational, descriptive and structural-semantic research methods; induction method. Results. The terminology of clinical veterinary hematology includes a system of concepts that denotes the structure and functions of the blood system, organs of hematopoiesis and cross-destruction, causes and mechanisms of development of blood diseases, their diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and prevention. The terminology of veterinary hematology is closely related to the terminology of veterinary immunology, oncology, radiology, toxicology, transfusiology and other specialized branches of veterinary and humane medicine. Clinical terminology is based on words of Greek origin or Greek-Latin, in contrast to anatomical terminology, which operates mainly in Latin vocabulary. There are single-word clinical terms (simple, derived, or compound), but most of them are complex terms and phrases. It is established the formation of veterinary hematology terminology occurs by the prefix method, in which the most commonly used prefixes are a-, an-, dys-, anti-, endo-, hyper-, hypo-, mono-, micro-, macro-; by the suffix method, in which the most commonly used suffixes are –osis, termoelements – -poiesis, -genesis, -philia, -penia, as well as using the morphemes haem(at) -, cyto-. According to the thematic area, the terms of veterinary hematology were grouped into the following groups: terms denoting structural components of the blood system; terms denoting blood formation; terms denoting progenitor cells of mature blood cells; terms denoting pathological changes that occur in the process of blood formation; terms denoting pathological changes in blood cells; terms denoting methods of studying the blood system; hematological terms denoting diseases or pathological conditions of the body. It is established that according to the structural characteristics, the terms of veterinary hematology can be simple, complex, or phrases. Difficulties in translating veterinary hematology terms lie in the specificity of terms, their bulkiness, the presence of a significant number of synonyms, abbreviations, eponyms, as well as constant updating of terminology as a result of the interpenetration of commonly used and special veterinary hematological, medical, biological terms. For texts on veterinary hematology, generally accepted approaches to applying translation transformations are used. In particular, they can apply grammatical, lexical, and lexical-grammatical transformations. Grammatical transformations include grammatical substitutions, offsets, additions, and omissions (antonymic translation, full transformation, and compensation). Lexical transformations used to translate veterinary hematology terminology include practical transcription, mixed transcoding, adaptive transcoding, transliteration and loan-translation. Originality. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that for the first time the terminology of veterinary hematology was analyzed as a separate structure of veterinary terminology, the features of the formation of the terminology of clinical veterinary hematology were highlighted, its lexical and semantic features were established. Systematization of lexical units of thematic and structural classifications is carried out, respectively. Methods of translating veterinary hematology terminology into Ukrainian are indicated. The peculiarities of the formation of clinical terminology of veterinary medicine on the example of veterinary hematology and the need for its further detailed study for the formation of adequate translation skills are proved. Conclusion. The terminology of veterinary hematology essentially reflects a wide range of terminological meanings of clinical veterinary medicine, which are constantly being developed and updated. A detailed structural analysis of the terminology of veterinary hematology in the future will allow us to study clinical terminology and features of its adequate translation in more depth.

Cognitive and Communicative Pragmatic Parameters of Intertextuality in Mass Media

Objective. The main objective of this research is to analyse the cognitive and communicative-pragmatic parameters of intertextuality in modern mediatexts. The article deals with the peculiarities of intertextuality expression in mass media as well as identifies the main varieties of intertexts and considers their role in newspaper articles of the information-analytical weekly “Dzerkalo tyzhnya”.
 Research methods. Discourse analysis technique helped to identify textual and extratextual characteristics of media content. At various stages of the study, a functional analysis method is used to determine intertextuality as a means of receiving text-formation. Communicative-pragmatic analysis allowed us to find out the conditions of formation of intertextuality and generation of new meanings in intertextual crossings, which is oriented on the cognitive-speech interaction of the participants of communication (author-reader). The psycholinguistic method has become the main scientific way of studying the processes of origin and perception of intertextuality in mediatexts. The common scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, systematization, special scientific techniques of linguistic text analysis have also been used.
 Results. The mediatext is a dynamic linguistic phenomenon, which responds promptly and responsibly to social-political, social-cultural and linguistic changes, reflecting the present realities in various ways. In the process of text-forming journalists try to expand the arsenal of professional means with a variety and original innovations, one of them is intertextuality.
 The main intertextuality means in mediatexts are quotations, allusions and reminiscences, which are good migration ways of familiar stories, events, people, expressions in the context of mass media. These elements are integrated into the new text, cause new emotions and associations, which revive cognitive interest to the material.
 Conclusions. Intertextuality is defined as a cognitive and communicative-pragmatic category, which realizes in modern mediatexts, activates cognitive and thoughtful activity of the author-journalist and the reader, stimulates intellectual searches of both communicants in the broad social-cultural space of many generations of humanity. The psycholinguistic mechanisms of the intertexts use in mass media are related to the actualization of certain images in the journalist’s mind and their verbal presentation with well-known expressions, symbols, stories.

LEXICOGRAPHIC MODEL OF THE SEMANTIC FIELD BAKERY ITEMS (in the English language)

Introduction. A semantic field modeled on the basis of lexicographic data can serve as a way to describe the lexical systematicity that objectively exists in a language and reflects in its turn the systematicity of information in our memory. Despite of numerous researches within the framework of field theory, the question of the specifics of the semantic field as a resultof lexicographic modeling of a language system, reflecting the systemic nature of a complex mental reality hidden from us, remains unanswered.Purpose. The article is devoted to the establishment of the specific structure and content of the lexicographic model of the semantic domain of the names of bakery items and the disclosure of the dynamics of field models of different time periods.Methods. The research is based on such methods and techniques of linguistic analysis as descriptive analysis, component analysis, field modeling and quantitative analysis.Results. The paper establishes and analyzes the specific structure and content of the lexicographic model of the semantic field bakery items in English. The semantic parameters of the verbalized fragment of reality uniting the items into semantic groups are distinguished.The hierarchy of semantic groups as well as of individual units within the field is established and described. The types of semantic relations connecting its units are revealed. The dynamics of field models that are different in time of presentation in lexicographic sources is analyzed.Conclusions. The result of lexicographic modeling of the semantic field bakery items in the English language is a semantic field structured by explicating the components of the meaning of the names of bakery items and selecting the corresponding lexical units from the dictionary. The structure of the semantic field includes 540 lexical units distributed over12 semantic groups. The structure of the field is formed by paradigmatic relations (43.1%), syntagmatic relations (51.2%) and thematic relations (5.7%).

Value-based prediction of election results using natural language processing: A case of the New Zealand General Election

In this article, we report the results of a study that tested a values-based method of predicting political election results. The study was carried out on the 2014 New Zealand General Election, randomly selecting a stratified sample from a consumer panel. The survey of 858 participants used open-ended questions to invoke and capture values relevant to the election. By using corpus linguistic analysis techniques, terms were ranked by weighting based on a log-frequency entropy method. Lexicons for Lasswell and Kaplan’s societal value framework reduced the corpus of term-weighted documents to a workable number of eight user-defined societal value-topics. The topics were regressed onto the individual voting decision using a multinomial logit (MNL) regression. The mean absolute deviation (MAD) from the actual vote was 1.8%, much less than the margin of error of 3.5% expected from sampling error alone. The methodology was successful in predicting the outcome for the minor parties with good accuracy, for example, the prediction for the then newly formed Internet-Mana was out by about 0.5%. The framing-balanced, value-based predictions exhibited reasonable stability, considering they were made six weeks before Election Day. Thus the values relevant to the voters and a good prediction of the voting behavior became evident ahead of the official campaign period, which started four weeks before Election Day in New Zealand. Our study concluded that the value-based prediction shows promise for improving the quality of political journalism and public engagement in the period of election campaigns, and will assist greatly in focusing public debate more on values that are influential on citizens’ voting decisions.

Visual analysis of online social media to open up the investigation of stance phenomena.

Online social media are a perfect text source for stance analysis. Stance in human communication is concerned with speaker attitudes, beliefs, feelings and opinions. Expressions of stance are associated with the speakers' view of what they are talking about and what is up for discussion and negotiation in the intersubjective exchange. Taking stance is thus crucial for the social construction of meaning. Increased knowledge of stance can be useful for many application fields such as business intelligence, security analytics, or social media monitoring. In order to process large amounts of text data for stance analyses, linguists need interactive tools to explore the textual sources as well as the processed data based on computational linguistics techniques. Both original texts and derived data are important for refining the analyses iteratively. In this work, we present a visual analytics tool for online social media text data that can be used to open up the investigation of stance phenomena. Our approach complements traditional linguistic analysis techniques and is based on the analysis of utterances associated with two stance categories: sentiment and certainty. Our contributions include (1) the description of a novel web-based solution for analyzing the use and patterns of stance meanings and expressions in human communication over time; and (2) specialized techniques used for visualizing analysis provenance and corpus overview/navigation. We demonstrate our approach by means of text media on a highly controversial scandal with regard to expressions of anger and provide an expert review from linguists who have been using our tool.

Web-Based Knowledge Acquisition Approach for Building Diseases Symptoms Ontology

Today medical ontologies have an important role in medicine field to represent medical knowledge. They are much stronger than biomedical vocabularies. In diseases diagnosis process, each disease has number of symptoms associated with it. We can employ ontology in helping to diagnose diseases by building Diseases-Symptoms ontology, which relate diseases and symptoms. Such ontology would be very useful for medical expert systems to assist physicians in diagnosis diseases or as a training tool for medical students. In this paper, we propose a method that automatically extract medical knowledge from Web resources and build Diseases-Symptoms ontology. We use the linguistic pattern and statistical analysis techniques based on Bing search engine. We evaluated the proposed method for two diseases Hyperthyroidism and Eczema by two consultant physicians.

Holding gestures across turns

It is widely supposed that speakers only gesture while speaking. In this paper, we consider how participants in Norwegian conversation use gestures held beyond the end of a turn-at-talk as a way to handle issues of shared understanding. Analysis combining the techniques of conversation analysis, linguistic, phonetic and visual analysis, demonstrates how participants use and orient to such held gestures as displays of occasions where participants do not (yet) have a shared understanding. The paper discusses how understanding is explicitly brought forward in a sequence of turns, and how shared understandings are reached and marked through a combination of spoken and gestural elements. The paper emphasizes the temporal progressivity of talk, the delicate timing of speech and gesture relative to one another, and the participants’ collaboration in successfully achieving and maintaining intersubjectivity.

Knowledge-based scheme to create privacy-preserving but semantically-related queries for web search engines

Web search engines (WSEs) are basic tools for finding and accessing data in the Internet. However, they also put the privacy of their users at risk. This happens because users frequently reveal private information in their queries. WSEs gather this personal data and build user profiles which are used to provide personalized search (PS). PS improves the users’ search results and, hence, it is a key element for the successfulness of WSEs: the entity that offers the best searching experience should attract more users. Nevertheless, profiles can also be used in an improper way by WSEs or they can be stolen by attackers. This situation requires privacy-preserving schemes able to handle from simple queries (one single term) to complex queries (several words with or without relation). Generally, these systems generate and submit inaccurate queries in order to provide privacy, but these queries must be carefully built in order to keep the usefulness of the user profiles. Current literature does not address the generation of privacy-preserving and useful complex queries. Therefore, this paper presents a new scheme that generates distorted user queries from a semantic point of view in order to preserve the usefulness of user profiles. Besides, linguistic analysis techniques are used to properly interpret complex queries performed by users and generate new semantically-related ones accordingly. The performance of the new scheme is evaluated in terms of semantic preservation of new queries, privacy level and runtime. A set of query logs taken from real users and compiled by AOL is used as test data.

TORC: test plan optimization by requirements clustering

Acceptance testing is a time-consuming task for complex software systems that have to fulfill a large number of requirements. To reduce this effort, we have developed a widely automated method for deriving test plans from requirements that are expressed in natural language. It consists of three stages: annotation, clustering, and test plan specification. The general idea is to exploit redundancies and implicit relationships in requirements specifications. Multi-viewpoint techniques based on RM-ODP (Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing) are employed for specifying the requirements. We then use linguistic analysis techniques, requirements clustering algorithms, and pattern-based requirements collection to reduce the total effort of testing against the requirements specification. In particular, we use linguistic analysis for extracting and annotating the actor, process and object of a requirements statement. During clustering, a similarity function is computed as a measure for the overlap of requirements. In the test plan specification stage, our approach provides capabilities for semi-automatically deriving test plans and acceptance criteria from the clustered informal textual requirements. Two patterns are applied to compute a suitable order of test activities. The generated test plans consist of a sequence of test steps and asserts that are executed or checked in the given order. We also present the supporting prototype tool TORC, which is available open source. For the evaluation of the approach, we have conducted a case study in the field of acceptance testing of a national electronic identification system. In summary, we report on lessons learned how linguistic analysis and clustering techniques can help testers in understanding the relations between requirements and for improving test planning.

Sites and parasites of meaning: Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’

Robert Browning’s so-called dramatic lyric ‘My Last Duchess’ has been interpreted differently by different critics, some seeing the Duke as shrewd and others seeing him as witless. This article attempts to account for these differing interpretations by analysing indeterminacies in the language of the poem. Starting out with the work of Derrida on speech act theory, and findings on the role of the right hemisphere in language processing, it goes on to propose techniques of linguistic analysis based on systemic-functional linguistics and the concept of particle-waves of language first discussed in Melrose (1996). The article then analyses a number of these so-called particle-waves in ‘My Last Duchess’, and concludes that opposing interpretations of the Duke can be traced to the indeterminacies of language in the particle-waves.

Market research for requirements analysis using linguistic tools

Numerous studies in recent months have proposed the use of linguistic instruments to support requirements analysis. There are two main reasons for this: (i) the progress made in natural language processing and (ii) the need to provide the developers of software systems with support in the early phases of requirements definition and conceptual modelling. This paper presents the results of an online market research intended (a) to assess the economic advantages of developing a CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tool that integrates linguistic analysis techniques for documents written in natural language, and (b) to verify the existence of the potential demand for such a tool. The research included a study of the language – ranging from completely natural to highly restricted – used in documents available for requirements analysis, an important factor given that on a technological level there is a trade-off between the language used and the performance of the linguistic instruments. To determine the potential demand for such tool, some of the survey questions dealt with the adoption of development methodologies and consequently with models and support tools; other questions referred to activities deemed critical by the companies involved. Through statistical correspondence analysis of the responses, we were able to outline two “profiles” of companies that correspond to two potential market niches, which are characterised by their very different approach to software development.