Stretches Of Text Research Articles

Czech instrumentals as shell nouns in L2 pedagogy

Using shell nouns is to facilitate efficiency by avoiding the repetition of long stretches of text (Kolhatkar & Hirst, 2014: 499), and to organize discourse in maintaining its coherence (Schmid, 2000; Flowerdew, 2003a). Identifying such coherence can be helpful for language users and learners in effectively expressing themselves, summarizing text, and retrieving information (Flowerdew, 2003b; Hinkel, 2004). According to Lin (2023), the instrumental case-marking is regarded as a Czech language-specific strategy for the use of shell nouns. As the field of language teaching and learning particularly focuses on the importance of using shell nouns (Schmid, 2018: 123), this study analyzes and discusses Czech shell nouns from the perspective of second language pedagogy. The aim is to investigate how Czech instrumentals are used as shell nouns in L2 data, based on learner corpora from CzeSL-SGT and LCSL. The results show that Czech instrumentals are used less frequently on average in learner corpora than in L1 data. In addition, there are very limited construction patterns of shell nouns used by these learners, and the average distribution of shell noun instrumentals is low. At the end of this study, specific pedagogy strategies derived from the discussion are presented, followed by proposed didactic instructions with a focus on the L1 Chinese learners. To sum up, from the perspective of L2 pedagogy, this study highlights that the appropriate use of Czech instrumentals as shell nouns can enhance Czech writing performance in text organization, as well as reading ability in information tracing and text summarization for learners of Czech.

ELF Density: Extending English as a Lingua Franca Research to Monological ELF Texts and Speeches

Abstract The focus to date on interactive encounters has resulted in there being little research into monological texts and speeches produced in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts. They are, however, the very substance of what interpreters and translators increasingly deal with today. The quality of these language professionals’ performance depends to a large extent on the input they receive. From a translation and interpreting studies (TIS) perspective, understanding what makes an ELF text or speech special and different seems paramount. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to exploring what is in an ELF text. We introduce the concepts of ‘ELF density’ and ‘ELF dense spots’ to capture and visualize types and tokens of ELF features as well as clusters they form at a local and more global level across stretches of text or speech and discuss a number of methodological challenges in determining ELF density. Based on a preliminary retrospective verbal protocol and interview analysis following 26 professional interpreters’ renditions, we aim to demonstrate the concepts’ added value for TIS, but also for non-TIS related applied linguistic tasks geared towards ELF.

СЛОВАЦКИЕ ТЕМПОРАЛЬНЫЕ НАРЕЧИЯ ČOSKORO, ONEDLHO, O CHVÍĽU: К ВОПРОСУ О КВАЗИСИНОНИМИИ

The article uses the material of the Slovak national corpus to examine the lexical meaning of the Slovak adverbs čoskoro, onedlho, o chvíľu. Their semantics presupposes a rapid onset of the situation in relation to the moment of speech or to the moment in the text. In the dictionaries of the Slovak language, these lexemes are usually not differentiated, which raises the question of their synonymy or quasi-synonymy. In the first part of the article, collocations of these adverbs are analyzed in the light of the logDice Association measure. In the second part, cases of mutual compatibility of lexemes are considered pairwise. It is shown that čoskoro tends to cooccur with mental verbs and verbs with the semantics of termination and disappearance, onedlho – with verbs with the meaning of achieving a goal, passing of time, or waiting, while o chvíľu is characterized by collocations with perceptual verbs. When adverbs cooccur in the same stretch of text, the situation indicated by onedlho usually follows the situation with čoskoro, and is most often related to it causally. O chvíľu more often denotes completed or predetermined situations, excluding the possibility of doubt. Thus, čoskoro is more focused on the interpretation of the situation by the speaker, onedlho – on the situation in its course, and o chvíľu – on the direct perception of the situation by the speaker with the ability to control the situation.

How MT errors correlate with postediting effort: a new ranking of error types

ABSTRACT As a result of the rapid development of translation technologies such as machine translation (MT), the global translation industry has inevitably entered a stage of intensive human-machine interaction. A clear manifestation of this is the industrial shift from the traditional workflow of translating from scratch to a new paradigm in which translations are produced by postediting, i.e., translating by fixing the errors in machine-translated texts). Recently, this shift has been expedited by the advent of neural machine translation, a new MT approach that delivers higher output quality in various domains and language pairs. However, although the core of postediting is the identification and correction of the errors generated by MT systems, more research is still in need on how MT errors correlate with postediting effort (the human effort demanded to postedit a machine-translated text). This paper reports on a preliminary study that examines the correlation between translation error types and cognitive postediting effort using empirical data on participants’ pauses in the postediting process. It is found that cognitive effort expended on an error is positively correlated with the stretch of text in which the error is embedded.

Other floors, other voices: A textography of a small university building.

Para conformar universidades lectoras y escritoras resulta vital comprender el contexto disciplinario y complejizar el análisis textual mediante una caracterización etnográfica, para así abordar nuestro “textually-mediated social world” (Barton, 2001); mundo en el que las prácticas de literacidad constituyen el centro de esta etnografía fina propuesta por Swales en esta obra. Esta obra ofrece una metodología para configurar una visión interna de los mundos en los que se escriben los textos, por qué se escriben así y qué valores subyacen.

Enumerations: Data and Literary Study. Andrew Piper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xiii+243.

<i>Enumerations: Data and Literary Study</i>. Andrew Piper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. xiii+243.

The flow of narrative in the mind unmoored: An account of narrative processing

ABSTRACTVerbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams.

Evaluative clash, evaluative cohesion and how we actually read evaluation in texts

Evaluative clashes are, of course, only noticed because of the expectation that speakers will use evaluation consistently and coherently over set stretches of discourse, a process I term evaluative harmony. In this paper I first categorize types of evaluative clash and then investigate, with detailed examples, many derived from large language corpora, of how speakers and writers both construct cohesive evaluative harmony in stretches of text but also how they can sometimes exploit this harmony to surprise and engage their listeners and readers.

CLiC Dickens: novel uses of concordances for the integration of corpus stylistics and cognitive poetics

This paper introduces the web application CLiC, which we developed as part of a research project bringing together insights from both cognitive poetics and corpus stylistics, with Dickens's novels as a case study. CLiC supports the analysis of discourse in narrative fiction with search options that make it possible to focus on stretches of text within and outside quotation marks. We argue that such search options open up novel ways of using concordances to link lexico-grammatical and textual patterns. We focus specifically on patterns for the creation of fictional characters. From a technical point of view, we explain the XML annotation that CLiC works with. Our discussion of textual examples focusses on phrases in fictional speech that illustrate significant differences between text within and outside quotation marks. In terms of theory, we argue that CLiC supports the identification of textual patterns that can provide insights into fictional minds and contribute to the exploration of readerly effects within the wider framework of mind-modelling.

Mediating metaphor in English translations of Dante's Inferno, Canto 13

ABSTRACTThe study is a product-oriented investigation into the translation of metaphor in four modern English versions of a stretch of text from Dante's Inferno. Its first aim is to establish the extent of equivalence of semantic field between the metaphors of the source text and their realizations in the target texts. This then provides the basis for exploring the mediation of metaphor by the translators and for analyzing the strategies they use. Toury's norms model is the frame of reference drawn on to explain the patterns of equivalence that emerge in the group. The discussion analyzes the findings of the data collection, as well as individual examples of mediation from the translated texts, for what they reveal about orientations towards ST- or TT-norms. Though there are interesting correspondences across the English versions, the study focuses on divergent mediations of source text metaphor because this is the perspective that enables features of the praxis of individual translators to emerge most clearly. The data are presented in a detailed table in an appendix to the study to supplement the material under discussion and provide a point of reference for it.

Coming to Grips with Shell-nounhood: A Critical Review of Insights into the Meaning, Function and Form of Shell-noun Phrases

This paper is concerned with the meaning, function and form of noun phrases headed by abstract nouns such as objective, problem or assumption. These nouns, labelled here as ‘shell nouns’, have been extensively investigated but, so far, the research focus has been on a limited range of patterns, meanings and functions. This is demonstrated here through a review of three widely held assumptions about shell nouns, namely that they are contextually unspecific and semantically abstract, that they encapsulate or package stretches of text, and that they favour definite and demonstrative determiners (e.g. this, these). The value of this paper, therefore, lies in its critical review and appraisal of previous and current research on shell-nounhood, with special emphasis on its complexity and on some of the challenges and gaps to be addressed and filled in by future research.

What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?: The Buried Life

Nemtin, Ben, et al. What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?: The Buried Life. New York: Artisan, 2012. Print. Nobody wants to think about dying. In fact, we often forget that our time is limited. The Buried Life, named after a Matthew Arnold poem, started in a garage in Victoria, BC when four disillusioned twenty-something university students got together to compile a list of 100 things they wanted to accomplish before they died. With a secondhand video camera and a used RV, these students set off for two weeks to tackle their bucket list. Six years later, they are still travelling the world, crossing items off that list. For every dream they accomplish, they help someone else fulfill a goal. “Write a bestselling book” was one dream on their list which they can now cross off. What Do You Want to Do Before You Die? is an illustrated compilation of stories about the background of the four members of The Buried Life, tales of how they crossed items off their list along with photographic evidence, and favourite quotations, as well as a list of items and narratives chosen from the tens of thousands of answers they have received in response to their question. Dreams vary from the simple, “I want to have my first kiss”, to the daring, “I want to climb the seven summits before I turn seventeen”, to the heartbreaking, “I want to finally say good-bye to my four friends who were killed in a car accident”. Somewhere in this book, every reader will find a dream that resonates. This is a book that will jump out at a YA audience, especially reluctant readers. Not only does the title and cover create immediacy, but the stories contained within it are edgy and thought-provoking. At eight pages, the introduction is the longest stretch of text, while the rest of the accounts are absorbing one page reflections that are scattered between bold and colourfully illustrated pages. This book will inspire readers to step outside of the ordinary. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Jennifer Lunny Jennifer Lunny is a new teacher-librarian at Ballenas Secondary School on Vancouver Island. A former English and Social Studies teacher, she is excited to promote literacy in her new position. Finding that special book to connect with a student is one of the highlights of her job. She has spent the fall semester building the collection at her school with many of the titles that were proposed in this project.

Otkrytaia struktura: Iakobson—Bakhtin—Lotman—Gasparov (Open Structure: Jakobson—Bakhtin—Lotman—Gasparov) (review)

Nataliia Avtonomova, Otkrytaia struktura: Iakobson--Bakhtin--Lotman--Gasparov (Open Structure: Jakobson--Bakhtin--Lotman--Gasparov). 503 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5824312546. Russia's most lasting contribution to the study of literature and language is a tradition of thought that begins in the 1910s with the OPOIaZ group in St. Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle; continues, through the intermediacy of Roman Jakobson, in the Prague Linguistic Circle of the late 1920s and 1930s; supplies inspiration for the French structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s; and receives further development on Russian soil in the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, formed in the mid-1960s. Nataliia Avtonomova's book is a spirited and ambitious attempt to recuperate this intellectual legacy and to advocate its unfading relevance to humanistic studies. She writes as a philosopher who addresses herself primarily to philosophers in order to bring to their attention epistemological riches they have largely ignored. She admits that much of what the book has to offer is common knowledge in literary studies (6); yet to philosophers its contents are recommended as a much-needed schooling in sober rationalism after the intellectual frivolities of postmodern thought. The book combines the analytical, biographic, memoiristic, philosophical, and documentary modes in a multifaceted generic pattern. On its pages, close scrutiny of critical coexists with theoretical reflection, ethical deliberations, reminiscences, biographic sketches, and epistolary material. (1) The end result is a sizable volume that holds a manifestly rich and engaging compendium of knowledge but does not fit easily into established conventions of scholarly writing. Avtonomova brings to her project wide erudition, an impeccable research apparatus, and that rare commodity--personalized knowledge of the intellectual personages she discusses. It is a deliberate strategy on her part to treat the four main figures in the book--Jakobson, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Iurii Mikhailovich Lotman, and Gasparov--not merely as texts but as individuals whose lives have bearing upon their work. (2) Avtonomova is widely known as the translator who introduced the Russian public to the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and her intimate acquaintance with the French intellectual tradition comes as an all-important asset in a book in which French-inspired poststructuralism figures as the main culprit. (3) In championing the cause of structuralist cognition, Avtonomova employs two distinct strategies. One aims to establish argumentatively that structures, when properly understood and elaborated, can account for the existence of the particular, the subjective, and the nonsystemic. The other strategy aims to document a great tradition of Russian philology in which thought about and the pursuit of rigorous scientific grounding for the study of literature have been kept alive to this day. Making a case and making a monument are complementary intentions within the overall conception of the book, although Avtonomova does not spell out how this tandem is supposed to function. I will comment below on how and why it functions to the author's advantage. The main text divides into five chapters, four of which treat at considerable length the four main heroes of the book (the chapter on Lotman runs to over 160 pages). As Avtonomova delves into the examination of each individual intellectual profile, the sense of an overarching trajectory becomes attenuated. For long stretches of text, the reader is left to wonder how the current discussion connects with the book's general objective. The four chapters, which draw in part upon previously published studies, retain a considerable degree of independence and never quite coalesce into a concerted ensemble. (4) Anticipating criticisms of the coherence of the volume, Avtonomova announces at the outset in a tone of mystery and metaphor: My heroes meet in an 'enchanted place'--in open structure (11). …

Contribution of Prosody in Audio-Visual Integration to Emotional Perception of Virtual Characters

Recent technology provides us with realistic looking virtual characters. Motion capture and elaborate mathematical models supply data for natural looking, controllable facial and bodily animations. With the help of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, we can automatically assign emotional categories to appropriate stretches of text for a simulation of those social scenarios where verbal communication is important. All this makes virtual characters a valuable tool for creation of versatile stimuli for research on the integration of emotion information from different modalities. We conducted an audio-visual experiment to investigate the differential contributions of emotional speech and facial expressions on emotion identification. We used recorded and synthesized speech as well as dynamic virtual faces, all enhanced for seven emotional categories. The participants were asked to recognize the prevalent emotion of paired faces and audio. Results showed that when the voice was recorded, the ...

The Unity of the Egyptian Hallel: Psalms 113–18

Abstract Discourse analysis provides the paradigmatic techniques that demonstrate the unity of the Egyptian Hallel at the textual level. A stretch of text is recognized as a discourse when it contains elements of cohesion, coherence, and prominence. Cohesion is determined by semantic factors. Coherence is determined by meaningful thematic flow, including evidence of thematic peaking, or prominence. The presence of these three factors supports the unitary nature of the Egyptian Hallel text.

The Unity of the Egyptian Hallel: Psalms 113–18

Abstract Discourse analysis provides the paradigmatic techniques that demonstrate the unity of the Egyptian Hallel at the textual level. A stretch of text is recognized as a discourse when it contains elements of cohesion, coherence, and prominence. Cohesion is determined by semantic factors. Coherence is determined by meaningful thematic flow, including evidence of thematic peaking, or prominence. The presence of these three factors supports the unitary nature of the Egyptian Hallel text.

A Discourse-Oriented Approach To ESP

ESP/EAP is essentially concerned with the genre-specific texts students are required to read/write and the kinds of activities they need to participate in. In this paper, we argue that to be effective ESP/EAP teaching and materials must be informed by adequately researched linguistic descriptions of the target genres and texts in general. There are characteristic rhetorical and organisational features and linguistic options which distinguish different genres and, without prior identification of these, ESP teaching will be ad hoc and cannot expect to help learners cope with the demands imposed on them by the need to read and write in their specific disciplines. Successful pedagogy which aims at enabling learners to master these genres must draw on linguistic descriptions which provide insights into the features and organisation of the texts. In this paper, we suggest a discourse-based approach to meet the need for ESP practice which is rooted in an understanding of the communicative purposes of texts and the linguistic manifestations of such purposes. Through an analysis of experimental research articles, we attempt to show that: i) choice of theme in citations can serve as a text organisational device to show the interdependencies and connectedness of the elements making up a stretch of text. ii) the macro-structure of an entire research article can be represented in terms of the generally-recognized Problem-Solution discourse pattern.

A Comparison of Reading Comprehension Processes in Good and Poor Comprehenders

REVIEWS SELECTED STUDIES in the area of reading comprehension in order to characterize the differential strategies that skilled and less skilled comprehenders employ. The research reviewed is organized into 3 broad components: 1) decoding, 2) assessing the meaning of single printed words, and 3) text organization processes or obtaining meaning from larger stretches of text. Results from various studies suggest that good and poor comprehenders differ primarily in the first and third components. Speculations are offered on the interrelationships between these components and their effect on reading comprehension processes.