Speaking Character Research Articles

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt and the Double Time of Motherhood

Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt and the Double Time of Motherhood

Logical Relations in the Argumentative Essays Written by Second-Year English Major Students in the Université de Zinder

This paper seeks to analyze the logical relations in the argumentative essays written by second-year English major students in the Université de Zinder (henceforth, UZ), the Republic of Niger. The students who enrolled for the second year in 2020-2021 were 80 in total, and they all followed a 10-week writing course. At the end of the course, they were asked to write an argumentative essay on two suggested topics. Using the descriptive mixed-method research design, this study randomly selected and examined ten of the students’ essays: 5 on the first topic and 5 on the second one. The logical relations in the texts were described or identified, and the findings thereof were tabulated. The findings revealed that the students used more clause complexes than clause simplexes in their essays, suggesting thus a spoken mode. The findings also indicated that the students deployed a lower number of rankshifted relations compared to the tactic relations found in their texts. This further exuded the speaking character of their texts. On the contrary, the findings showed a relatively small use of clause simplexes, rankshift and hypotaxis the texts, all of which are suggestive of a written mode. Another striking feature noted in some of the essays is the deployment of projection; projection of locutions mainly, but what is generally expected in an argumentative essay is the projection of ideas. The article concludes by highlighting the need to overtly teach EFL students the traits of spoken language and written language. This could be done, for instance, by focusing on the two systems of logical relations, namely: taxis and logico-semantics in the writing class.

Attention guided deep audio-face fusion for efficient speaker naming

Speaker naming has recently received considerable attention in identifying the active speaking character in a movie video, and face cue alone is generally insufficient to achieve reliable performance due to its significant appearance variations. In this paper, we treat the speaker naming task as a group of matched audio-face pair finding problems, and present an efficient attention guided deep audio-face fusion approach to detect the active speakers. First, we start with VGG-encoding of face images and extract the Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients from audio signals. Then, two efficient audio encoding modules, namely two-layer Long Short-Term Memory encoding and two-dimensional convolution encoding, are addressed to discriminate the high-level audio features. Meanwhile, we train an end-to-end audio-face common attention model to discriminate the face attention vector, featuring adaptively to accommodate various face variations. Further, an efficient factorized bilinear model is presented to deeply fuse the paired audio-face features, whereby the joint audio-face representation can be reliably obtained for speaker naming. Extensive experiments highlight the superiority of the proposed approach and show its very competitive performance with the state-of-the-arts.

“Existences holding hands”: Winterson retelling Shakespeare

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death,The Hogarth Press inaugurated Hogarth Shakespeare project, which sees Shakespeare's works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today. first volume of the series to appear was Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of (2015), a cover version of The Winter's Tale. Winterson considers it a talismanic text for her,in part because it is a play about a foundling, and Winterson is one. But The Winter's Tale is also a play about forgiveness, a theme which has always been dear to Winterson, who wrote about it in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011).The paper aims to underline such aspects in her rewriting of Shakespeare's play, together with the theme of time, fundamental to both Shakespeare and Winterson. is indeed among the protagonists of The Winter's Tale, which can be read as a meditation on (Lombardo 2004), so much so that time is embodied as a speaking character in the Chorus. Time is reversible, declares Winterson in her cover version; time redeems and can be redeemed, Shakespeare seems to suggest in The Winter's Tale. The Gap of completes a retelling of such themes that Winterson started back in 1989 with her novel Sexing the Cherry, in which she claimed that parallel lives, made of the alternative decisions not taken in the past, go on living so as to create an alternative present, which is what happens in The Winter's Tale.

Spoken character classification using abductive network

In this paper, we address the problem of learning a classifier for the classification of spoken character. We present a solution based on Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) learning paradigm for the development of a robust abductive network classifier. We improve the reliability of the classification process by introducing the concept of multiple abductive network classifier system. We evaluate the performance of the proposed classifier using three different speech datasets including spoken Arabic digit, spoken English letter, and spoken Pashto digit. The performance of the proposed classifier surpasses that reported in the literature for other classification techniques on the same speech datasets.

FICTIONAL DIALOGUE: PATTERN DESIGN, FIGURATIVE MEANING, LANGUAGE SPECIFICS (BASED ON M.A. SHOLOKHOV’S PROSE)

Purpose. The purpose of the conducted research is revealing the pattern design of the figurative meaning forming in the characters’ speech conversations. We develop the notion of fictional dialogue as the archetypical form of reflecting the daily life interaction in the author’s universe. The article defines the constructive role of ambiguity, contradiction, humorous reality reproduction and paradox in the reader’s interpretation of the coherent literary piece of work. The deduction is made that on constructing the fictional dialogue the author appeals to the specific form of realism and authenticity, representing the language characteristics which the reader admits as typical, though idealized for the particular speech situation. Interpersonal conversation taking place between the characters is embedded into the general communicative process where the narrator and the reader invariably take part. Methodology. The research analyzes the fictional dialogue fragments reflecting the characters’ personal characteristics. The material for investigation is based on the examples of the characters’ interaction taken from the second volume of M.A. Sholokhov’s “And Quiet Flows the Don”. The concrete methodology applied to the analysis of the speech material is characterized as a complex combination of the elements of descriptive, componental and pragmatic and semantic methods. Results. In the course of fictional dialogue development, the speaking character’s personal characteristics are actualized. The speech conversation partakers’ features, their various correlation determine the author’s choice of the linguistic means in the process of speech conversation constructing, reflecting the verbal behavior of the interacting characters. The author constructs the dialogue in such a way that various (psychological, intellectual, social and cultural) characters’ personality features start to have influence upon the basic development of interpersonal interaction being constructed , as well as determine the external dialogic context. Thus, the reader interpreting the fictional dialogue uses the expression plan to reconstruct the content plan. Practical implications. The material investigated can be used in the practical courses on literary text interpretation and in teaching text linguistics and fictional narrative theory.

The Story of Joseph’s Brothers in Light of the “Therapeutic Narrative” Theory

Many critics have addressed the importance of recapitulation in biblical narrative and its contribution toward the shaping of narrative. This essay marks an attempt to assess the role of recapitulation in light of the basic assumptions of the “therapeutic narrative” theory. According to this approach, the “truth” that surfaces over the course of psychological treatment does not necessarily correspond to historical truth. It rather reflects a narrative truth, in light of which the life of the patient is drawn anew, in a more consistent, gratifying, and effective manner than it was in the original, destructive story. On the basis of this notion, we may assess the role of recapitulation in biblical narrative in terms of its contribution to the reader’s ability to penetrate the speaking character’s subconscious, assess the new point of focus that the character chooses in presenting his or her story, and thereby determine the emotional process that the character undergoes. This approach is exemplified through an analysis of the Joseph narrative, in which the brothers must repeatedly tell their story to various characters in the story. It appears that two points of focus are developed over the course of the narrative by the various repetitions: the relationship between human activity (and the acceptance of responsibility for that activity) and divine providence, and the characters’ ability to interpret hidden messages that are not stated openly.

"Turn Right or Left": Literary Use of Dialect in 2 Samuel 14:19?

This article investigates non-standard spelling in two verses in the Succession Narrative, 2 Sam 14:19 and 2 Sam 11:24, and introduces the idea that the author makes literary use of dialect to portray character. Three consecutive words with unusual spelling in 2 Sam 14:19 are tested against linguistic data and identified as a possible depiction of spoken non-standard dialect. Such use of dialect is literary and intentional, as distinct from dialect that occurs in narrative as an unwitting reflection of the writer's own language. Through the use of dialect, the speaking character, the wise woman of Tekoa, can emphasize her own unimportance to protect herself, to avoid being perceived as a threat by the king. By contrast, the possible dialect spoken by Joab's messenger (2 Sam 11:24) carries a different meaning. In that case, the literary use of an awkward hypercorrection of dialect instead illustrates the ineptness of the messenger in conveying Joab's message to the king.

The International Legal Scholar in Palestine: Hurling Stones Under the Guise of Legal Forms? A Talk with Martti Koskenniemi and Mudar Kassis

This paper is the written transcript of the author’s exchange of views with Martti Koskenniemi and Mudar Kassis on the occasion of a debate organized by the Institute of Law (IoL) of the University of Birzeit. The paper explores the origin of international lawyers’ frustrated expectations when it comes to the role of international law in the Middle East. It more specifically argues that the disenchantment of international lawyers is the upshot of three well-entrenched beliefs. It then elaborates on three attitudes which can help international lawyers make sense of the role of international law in general and, in particular, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Attention is paid to the place of compliance in studies about international law, the role of legal forms and, eventually, the role of international legal scholars in a conflict like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The spoken character of the text has been preserved.

Robertson Davies and Music

Robertson Davies once described himself as a ‘Failed Musician,’ but the musical education that Davies received, the role that music played in his life, and the use he made of music and musicians in his novels show that this is true only in the narrow sense that he did not earn a living from music. A proficient melopoetic artist, weaving music and musicians into his literary works with consummate skill and artistry, he was also professionally active as a music critic and a librettist. The German composer E.T.A. Hoffmann is the only historical musician to be given his real name and appear as a speaking character in any of the novels, but many of the author's fictional musicians are based on real-life models, and despite his great love of music, Davies often portrayed musicians as uncouth reprobates. Music, which sometimes provides structural foundations for Davies' literary works and other times serves as a leitmotif, is often a portal to unseen worlds, including the realm of the dead and of supernatural phenomena, or the domains of religious experience or creativity.

Robertson Davies and Music

Abstract Robertson Davies once described himself as a ‘Failed Musician,’ but the musical education that Davies received, the role that music played in his life, and the use he made of music and musicians in his novels show that this is true only in the narrow sense that he did not earn a living from music. A proficient melopoetic artist, weaving music and musicians into his literary works with consummate skill and artistry, he was also professionally active as a music critic and a librettist. The German composer E.T.A. Hoffmann is the only historical musician to be given his real name and appear as a speaking character in any of the novels, but many of the author's fictional musicians are based on real-life models, and despite his great love of music, Davies often portrayed musicians as uncouth reprobates. Music, which sometimes provides structural foundations for Davies' literary works and other times serves as a leitmotif, is often a portal to unseen worlds, including the realm of the dead and of supern...

System for speech recognition

This invention provides a system for speech recognition comparing speech against stored character strings in memory. Speech is transformed into spoken character strings. To accelerate the identification, a small group of characters from the stored character strings and the spoken character string are compared and the probabilities for identification may be calculated from those results. Those stored patterns, where the probability for identifying the speech exceeds a predetermined value, may be selected for further processing. The selected strings may have the remaining characters added to the group of characters for the next comparison. Alternatively, the number of characters for comparison may be incremented by a predetermined number in a step-by-step fashion, reducing the number of comparisons in subsequent steps as the probabilities for identification rise. The character string in memory with the highest probability for the identification match may be recognized as the character string identifying the speech.

Silent by Convention?: Sophocles' Tekmessa

Silent by Convention?Sophocles' Tekmessa Kirk Ormand I. Dramatic Conventions Female characters in Athenian tragedy are, as a rule, more often vocal than silent. Often the men around them perceive their speech as a threat to masculine order, and go to some lengths to silence them, but the women speak nonetheless. It must be considered remarkable, therefore, when a female character who has spoken forcefully and authoritatively for two-thirds of a play exits, only to return as a mute character played by a non-speaking "extra." This is exactly what happens in Sophocles' Ajax, and the event is all the more surprising because we would expect Tekmessa to have good reason to speak when she returns. After all, as a recent critic has suggested, "Sophocles . . . seems to have felt that the full extent of Ajax' fall . . . could be best appreciated in the presence of his wife."1 Surely the pathos of the scene could be greatly increased by having Ajax's wife lament her dead husband. Why, then, does Sophocles render this all important presence a silent one? The simple answer relies on stage convention. Odysseus must resolve the dispute between Agamemnon and Teukros; all three must be onstage, and in speaking roles, at the same time.2 But this answer ignores an important feature of Tekmessa's long silence, namely that from her entrance at 1168 until Odysseus' at 1315, the original audience cannot have known that Tekmessa was a silent character.3 Since she speaks throughout the early portion of the play, her subsequent silence must come as something of a surprise. Characters leaving the stage to return as mute, particularly those in major roles, are quite rare, and Tekmessa's silence is unique in several respects.4 The closest parallel is Alcestis at [End Page 37] the end of Euripides' Alcestis, though there the other characters on stage give an explicit explanation for her silence.5 In Ajax no such explanation is proffered; rather, Sophocles creates a dazzling series of entrances and exits that surround and emphasize Tekmessa's silence. I suggest, therefore, that in this play Tekmessa's silence is not an inevitable result of the three-actor rule, but that Sophocles toys with the three-actor rule and the use of mute characters specifically in order to mark and justify Tekmessa's silent presence. In this way a social convention-that women in Athens were not to be heard-is reinforced and validated by dramatic convention, even in unconventional circumstances. Consider first the set of exits and entrances that make Tekmessa's silence possible and, eventually, necessary. Although earlier in the play Tekmessa had been on stage with Ajax and her son Eurysakes (544), she apparently left the child by the tents while searching for her husband. Thus, when Teukros enters, it seems that he sends Tekmessa to fetch the boy (986).6 At 1042 Menelaos begins his entrance, and Teukros and Menelaos have their bitter argument. Menelaos leaves at 1160. Almost immediately (1168) Tekmessa and Eurysakes return. Bear in mind that we have no reason to suspect that Tekmessa is a mute character at this point-only she, the boy (too young for a speaking part), and Teukros [End Page 38] are on stage with the chorus. After a brief dedicatory offering, Teukros leaves to set up a tomb (1184). In less than 200 lines, we have seen three exits and two entrances. This is closer to the pace of farce than that of tragedy. As Teukros leaves, the chorus begins a song. When they are finished, the audience must expect that Tekmessa will begin to lament her dead husband. She is the only speaking character (so far as we know) left on the stage, and furthermore her entrance was properly announced by Teukros, just as if she were a speaking character: Look, just at the right time these two are near,the son and wife of this man . . .7 (1168-69) It would certainly be in character and within the bounds of the genre for her to do so. In fact, lament of the dead is a traditional role for women in real life, in tragedy, and in its epic precursors.8...

Noah's Wife Again

In her important study of the Wakefield Group in the Towneley cycle, Dr. Millicent Carey has much to say regarding the various English versions of the play of Noah and his wife. Here, says Dr. Carey, “Noah's wife appears as a speaking character for the first time ... Although she is mentioned in all the other versions from the Bible on, she is never known to utter a word until the dramatists of the Middle Ages make her an important member of their dramatis personae.” For the unbiblical Newcastle introduction of the devil and the temptation of Noah's wife—unique in the English miracle plays—Dr. Carey says that she has found no hint in Jewish legend. She considers the suggestion of Brotanek, who favors derivation by analogy with the Eve legend; of Brandl, who argues an approximation to Morality play construction; and of Cushman, who, rejecting the two former theories, remarks on the ubiquitous rôle of the devil as tempter in medieval legend generally. She points out an English dramatic parallel in the incident of the appearance of the devil to Pilate's wife in the York cycle, itself perhaps derived through analogy from the Eve story, and refers to certain other Continental parallels where the devil is a well-recognized device for registering “obstruction to the expressed wishes of God”—a device which may have originated in the Eve story or “may simply be a reflection of the mediaeval tendency to explain all evil as caused by the devil.”

The Poema Biblicum of Onulphus

The attention of students of mediaeval drama has often been arrested by a short dramatic text from a Vienna manuscript published by DuMéril among the examples of the liturgical Epiphany play in his Origines Latines du Théâtre Moderne. Among the mediaeval Latin plays of Epiphany this slight specimen is unique in its rhetorical form, in the names of the dramatis personæ, and in the absence of liturgical elements. The play is composed of thirteen leonine hexameters, which provide thirty-one speeches, each of the last ten hexameters being divided among three speakers. The first three lines, in the nature of an invitatory, are assigned to Stella as a speaking character, and the Magi appear under the names of Aureolus, Thureolus, and Myrreolus. The play bears no marks from the liturgy. Although the introductory rubric Ad adorandum Filium Dei per Stellam invitantur Eoy might serve well enough for launching a liturgical play, there is no concluding rubric to indicate a liturgical association, and the text itself contains no formulae reminiscent of the liturgy.