Semantic Strata Research Articles

Mapuche women in the city: celebrating their process of ethnogenesis

ABSTRACT The article examines how urban Mapuche women co-construct discourses about their ethnogenesis process through evaluations and dialogical positioning. The methodology is qualitative with an interpretive design. The collection method was a focus group in which four urban Mapuche women between 25 and 55 years old participated. The analysis was conducted from a Critical Discourse Studies approach that integrates sociopolitical studies of Mapuche history and decolonial perspectives on the formation of ethnic identity, with the analytical tools of the appraisal system within the Systemic Functional Linguistics theoretical framework. The study focuses on the intersubjective meanings of the attitude and engagement to identify evaluations, positions, and voices present in this discursive construction. The results indicate that participants develop discursive strategies of ‘counter-racialization’ to respond to the ‘racialization’ that has shaped their lives. The discursive strategies are collectively constructed through different evaluative micro-maneuvers that are realized in the discursive semantic stratum as couplings of areas of attitude: affect/judgement and affect/appreciation and couplings of the attitude/engagement meanings. Through these discursive strategies, these women re-signify and celebrate their Mapuche identity by embodying a new symbolic territory that allows them to carry their ancestors and spiritual world.

Punctuation in English and Kurdish

Punctuation, of paramount significance in written discourse analysis, is a highly developed system which modifies linguistic forms on phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic strata in written texts. Nevertheless, until recently, it has not received ample attention due to remaining in the shade of prosody or grammatical relations. In the last few decades, strikingly, it has been established that a genuine conception of the written language is impracticable if punctuation is not taken into consideration. Meanwhile, cross-linguistic studies have been recommended by some scholars (e.g. Little, 1986; Krahn, 2014); thus, though some studies have been conducted comparing the English punctuation system with that of other languages, there is a dearth of studies exploring this crucial aspect of written discourse in English and Kurdish. Therefore, drawing on Krahn's new paradigm (2014) which treats punctuation as an independent linguistic feature of the written modality, the present paper aims to cross-examine the punctuation system in both languages in a quest for outlining any similarities and differences that the two languages uncover in this area. More specifically, the study seeks to answer these questions: how are the punctuation marks different or similar in English and Kurdish? Does the punctuation system exhibit the same level of complexity in both languages? Are all the punctuation marks manifested in English realised in Kurdish either and vice versa? The paper is purely based on a qualitative research approach. The results show that the two languages bear significant similarities and differences in the manifestation and employment of punctuation symbols. Yet, the punctuation system in English is more complex than Kurdish. Punctuation in the static and dynamic axes instantiates an area of considerable divergence between the two languages-though some similarities are predominant.

A corpus-based study of grammatical post-metaphorical expressions

Abstract In Systemic Functional Linguistics, meanings in semantic stratum could be realized by congruent/premetaphorical, metaphorical, or demetaphorical/post-metaphorical expressions in lexico-grammatical stratum. This paper, evidenced from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), explores the specific pathway from metaphorical expressions to post-metaphorical ones guided by principles of Context-first and AS IF and the principle of double functionality. The findings show that grammatical postmetaphorization is mainly realized by post-metaphor of ideation and that of modality. The former finds its expressions from common nouns to proper nouns (e.g. from security to Security), or from uncountable nouns to countable nouns (e.g. from security to securities), and the latter is evidenced by expressions shifting from explicit objective orientation to its explicit subjective counterpart (e.g. from it is possible that to it might be possible that), or by modal probability of I think type shifting from clausal initial position to clausal medial or final position (e.g. I think in the medial or final position of the clause).

Introduction to Race and Biology

The notion of race, as commonly employed, is often and spontaneously associated with a biological foundation. To explain this connection with biology it is necessary to undertake an archaeological approach to the concept of race. Such an approach will identify different semantic strata, which, for both the scientific community and lay circles, have come to overlap. The first stratum corresponds to the period before biology was recognized as a scientific discipline. There was a longstanding te...

THE COMMENTARY OF NESATI’S ODE WITH “EVEN” REDIF IN TERMS OF SEMANTIC STRATA

Ponte Academic JournalDec 2021, Volume 77, Issue 12 THE COMMENTARY OF NESATI'S ODE WITH "EVEN" REDIF IN TERMS OF SEMANTIC STRATAAuthor(s): Mehmet OzdemirJ. Ponte - Dec 2021 - Volume 77 - Issue 12 doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2021.12.2 Abstract:As a work of art, poetry is a world of meaning that the artist creates with words to express feelings and thoughts. This world of meaning consists of two basic strata, which are the words and sounds that make up the poem as the first stratum, and the second is the meaning stratum where the message the poet wants to convey to the recipient through words. Although both strata are important for the art of poetry, the main purpose of the poet is to establish the meaning world of poetry, namely, the irreal stratum, through the word stratum. This irreal stratum is enriched by the elements such as the knowledge, culture, interpretation of the realm of existence, artistic ability, emotional intensity, etc. of the poet. The reflection of these elements on the poem enriches the semantic world of the poem creating rich connotations in the mind of the reader. The more a poem connotates elements in the mind of the reader through the semantic strata in the irreal stratum, the more valuable it becomes artistically. In this context, it is a necessity to discuss and analyze the semantic strata especially in odes to uncover the artistic value of classical Turkish poetry. Based on this idea, Nesati’s ode with “even” redif will be analyzed, and the semantic strata in the irreal stratum will be discussed. Download full text:Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Username Password

Interpersonal functions of interjections

Abstract Motivated by the frequent omission of interjections from film subtitles, this study investigates the interpersonal functions of interjections, and seeks to disentangle their meaning relations. Based on the analysis of interjections from six English language films under the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the study primarily classifies the functions of interjections in terms of whether the interjections independently realize moves in exchange. The function of the interjection which realizes a move on its own is described at the semantic stratum in terms of a minor speech function, and the function of the interjection which realizes a move together with a clause is described at the lexicogrammatical stratum in terms of an optional clausal function referred to as a ‘latched function’. The study highlights the distinction between latched functions and their agnate minor speech functions, and offers more delicate accounts of the functions of interjections. It proposes a system network of the minor speech functions, which can facilitate a more systematic analysis of the functions realized by interjections. This study contributes to the SFL description of English interjections, and can offer methodological insights into further research on the functionality of interjections.

Accelerating semogenesis: an ecosocial approach to photography

Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen’s term ‘semogenesis’ refers to how meaning potentials are created through processes on many co-occurring time frames, most prominently those referred to as ‘phylogenesis’, ‘ontogenesis’ and ‘logogenesis’. The concept was originally infused with linguistic concern in an attempt to link a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) account of the lexico-grammatical and semantic strata with lived experience. In this article, the authors rethink the concept in order to (1) broaden its scope to the concerns of multimodal studies, and (2) accommodate how digital technology impacts on our communication practices. They do so by discussing semogenesis from a vantage point of ‘ecosocial semiotics’, a perspective that asks us to blend both sociological, technological, material and biological understandings of human activity. Taking digital photography as an example, the authors argue that digital media afford an acceleration of processes of multimodal semogenesis on all semogenetic time frames. Picking up the notion of ‘microgenesis’, a fourth, faster-than-logogenesis time frame that serves as a placeholder for any process enabling logogenesis, they suggest that this acceleration is driven by the global-scale introduction of digital technology. Through a discussion of select examples from the history of photography, specifically contrasting nascent photographic practice with contemporary photography, they propose that the development from camera to digital camera and the subsequent consolidation in recent decades of digital cameras into smartphones has had a profound impact, not only on practices of photography, but also on the processes of meaning making with photographic material.

ПОЭТИКА АБСУРДА И СРЕДСТВА ЕЕ ВЫРАЖЕНИЯ В ПОЭМЕ ВЕНЕДИКТА ЕРОФЕЕВА «МОСКВА - ПЕТУШКИ»

The article describes the figurative and expressive means, by which the author’s conception of the absurd and contradictive world acquires artistic realization in the poem “Moscow - Petushki” by Venedikt Yerofeyev. The paper considers the following issues: the lexical and semantic strata that help to describe reality as a realm of incredible contradictions and absurd; the lofty and the earthly, which are not separated and are not opposed to each other but form the ambivalent whole; verbal stream beyond logic and cause-and-effect relations, which allows the reader to make multiple interpretations of the poem.

Bridging Pragmatic Gap in Translation Process through Developing Pragmatic Awareness

<p>In order for the translator to be able to translate the source text into the target language in a relevant way, the strata of the translated text through which relevance can be obtained (pragmatic, pragmatic-semantic, and semantic strata) should be equalized to that of the source text (Li & Luo, 2004). The translator can achieve this by raising his/her awareness of the source and target language pragmatic perspectives. To investigate the actual effect of developing knowledge of pragmatic perspectives of the source language and the target language on the quality of translation of culture-bound texts, the current study was conducted on 64 Iranian undergraduate students of English translation. The study consisted of three phases: 1) administering a culture-bound text to be translated by all participants, 2) dividing participants into two groups: one merely receiving translation exercises while the other receiving metapragmatic discussions of the pragmatic perspectives of the source language along with translation exercises, and 3) assessing the translation quality of both groups immediately and two months following the treatment. The study revealed the significant positive effect of pragmatic instruction on improving the quality of translation of culture-bound texts and maintaining the obtained knowledge. The pedagogical implications of the findings suggested incorporating the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives of the source language and their distinctions with the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives of the target language into translation classes as an integral part of translation classes.</p>

Cognitive canonicalization of natural language queries using semantic strata

Natural language search relies strongly on perceiving semantics in a query sentence. Semantics is captured by the relationship among the query words, represented as a network (graph). Such a network of words can be fed into larger ontologies, like DBpedia or Google Knowledge Graph, where they appear as subgraphs— fashioning the name subnetworks (subnets). Thus, subnet is a canonical form for interfacing a natural language query to a graph database and is an integral step for graph-based searching. In this article, we present a novel standalone NLP technique that leverages the cognitive psychology notion of semantic strata for semantic subnetwork extraction from natural language queries. The cognitive model describes some of the fundamental structures employed by the human cognition to construct semantic information in the brain, called semantic strata. We propose a computational model based on conditional random fields to capture the cognitive abstraction provided by semantic strata, facilitating cognitive canonicalization of the query. Our results, conducted on approximately 5000 queries, suggest that the cognitive canonicals based on semantic strata are capable of significantly improving parsing and role labeling performance beyond pure lexical approaches, such as parts-of-speech based techniques. We also find that cognitive canonicalized subnets are more semantically coherent compared to syntax trees when explored in graph ontologies like DBpedia and improve ranking of retrieved documents.

The Hierarchical Organization of Text as Conceptualized by Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Systemic Functional Perspective

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is an approach to the study of text organization which conceptualizes in relational terms a domain within the semantic stratum. In this paper, within an RST conceptualization of text organization, I propose that there are rhetorical subgroupings (or bands) between the local level of text organization, which is grammaticalized by clause complexing, and the upper most level of text organization, which potentially coincides with generic structure. Based on a quantitative analysis, I present a way of viewing text organization in terms of these rhetorical subgroupings within a text that is determined by clause complex boundary and text span size. The corpus used in this study comprises six undergraduate essays that were analysed using RST. In my corpus, other than rhetorical relations that occur within clause complexes and those that occur at the macro level of organization, there are three levels of rhetorical subgroupings of text spans, with identifiable subsets of rhetorical relations. These subgroupings provide a way of conceptualizing mid-level organization within a text, that is the rhetorical ‘chunking’ of different text span sizes within a large text.

Semantic strata in narrative texts

Semantic strata in narrative texts

A Systemic Model of the Elaborated Code

The paper offers a refinement of a model of code elaboration grounded in the data of an earlier multivariate analysis of markers of code in spoken English. Four modes of the code are postulated to exist that pre-select routes of choice through the system networks of the semantic stratum.