On verbal irony, meta-linguistic knowledge and echoic interpretation

2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zohar Livnat

The aim of this paper is to examine some actual examples of written verbal irony that contain apposition. Meta-linguistic knowledge about apposition as a syntactic structure is claimed to be involved in the interpretation process of the utterance and especially in recognizing the victim of the irony. This discussion demonstrates the interdependence between apposition, its echoic quality in particular cases, and the victim of the irony. Since syntactic structure may serve as a cue to indirect meaning, pointing at the specific meta-linguistic knowledge used for interpreting ironic utterances may enrich the discussion and enhance the description of the interpretation process. Different types of echoing are demonstrated and examined. The analysis also suggests that untruthfulness may serve mainly as a cue to the presence of irony, rather than as an essential component of this phenomenon.

Author(s):  
Iuliia Zelena

The article is devoted to the study of marked and unmarked attributive constructions, considering the influence of semantic transfer mechanisms, taking into account their productive potential. Structuraland semantic characterization of types of attributive constructions is performed in light of two initial theories –in view ofreferentstatusand actual sentence fragmentation. An independent research of relationsbetween predication manifestations and the semanticand syntactic structure of a sentence has been performed by determining the valence properties of attributive verbs. The distinctionbetween different types of constructionswith the attribute complement isdescribed and it is specifiedthat there is a direct correlation between the type of attributive sentences and the emergence of predicative relation.The article is dedicated to the analysis of modification of the information structure and the status of the referent in sentences containing attributive object. Given the types of interpretation of attributive sentences and, based on the results of contextual analysis, it became possible to prove that change of argumentative structure in verbal group gives a reason to treat attributive verb with elements SN2 and X as a predicative focus of the sentence and permit to consider it as the complex secondary predicate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (87) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alina Ihnatova ◽  
◽  
Valentyna Marchenko ◽  

The article is devoted to topical problems of translation of modern English-language film discourse (based on the TV series "The Big Bang Theory"). Stylistic features of English-language film discourse are characterized. It is noted that the language of English-language film discourse has certain features and directions for certain categories of speakers and recipients. In the course of the analysis of English-language film discourse, a direct relationship between the degree of complexity of the selected language tools and socio-cultural specific features of the target audience is proved. The irony is a move to challenge norms, rules, common sense. It easily turns into a paradox and a joke. Comparisons of two or more textual worlds, styles, paradoxical comparisons, quotations, parodies lead to endless possibilities for variations in the understanding of ironic means. Socio-cultural linguistic elements that complicate film translation include realities (non-equivalent vocabulary), proper names, idiomatic expressions and jargon, dialect and variant features, humor. Non-linguistic features of the socio-cultural character contained in the visual and sound plans of a motion picture can also affect translation. At the same time, empirical studies of the application and methods of film translation testify to the existence of specific operational rules, that is, the patterns of behavior of the translator in some sociocultural situation – the situation of translation for film screening. Thus, the conducted study shows that "film discourse" is a "broader concept than cinema text” and “film dialogue”, which includes various correlations with other fields of science, such as literature, theater, art, etc. In addition, it is in the cinema discourse that the final interpretation of sen sous, embedded in the movie. In this case, cinema text is a fragment of cinema discourse and includes two heterogeneous semiotic systems: linguistic and non-linguistic, the film dialogue appears as the linguistic component of the film. Therefore, the audiovisual images operated by cinema become an indispensable element of the new discourse of modernity, which is the source of social, cultural, psychological as well as linguistic knowledge. This is why book adaptations are so popular because they save time and effort. However, as a result of a comparative lexical stylistic analysis of the book and its TV version, it was found that the number of lexical means and stylistic figures in the literary work is much greater and striking in its diversity, especially when it comes to descriptions. In the film, the language becomes poorer because dialogic speech is a predominantly spoken-and-everyday style characterized by general vocabulary and changes in the syntactic structure of sentences. The sentences in the movie are usually simple, not complex, full of exclamations and pauses and easy to hear. Film discourse should be understood as the process of play and perception of a film, the meaning of which is the mutual influence of several semiotic systems. Cinema discourse involves participants in the discourse, time and space of their interaction. The main difficulty in translatable movie text is the possibility and degree of adaptation of the text to a foreign language culture, built on a different system of values and concepts, and this factor causes the inevitable loss in the perception of translatable cinema with other subjects and / or incompatible with other linguistic culture failures of a large number of films.


Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-81
Author(s):  
Véronique Verhagen ◽  
Maria Mos ◽  
Joost Schilperoord ◽  
Ad Backus

AbstractIn a usage-based framework, variation is part and parcel of our linguistic experiences, and therefore also of our mental representations of language. In this article, we bring attention to variation as a source of information. Instead of discarding variation as mere noise, we examine what it can reveal about the representation and use of linguistic knowledge. By means of metalinguistic judgment data, we demonstrate how to quantify and interpret four types of variation: variation across items, participants, time, and methods. The data concern familiarity ratings assigned by 91 native speakers of Dutch to 79 Dutch prepositional phrases such as in de tuin ‘in the garden’ and rond de ingang ‘around the entrance’. Participants performed the judgment task twice within a period of one to two weeks, using either a 7-point Likert scale or a Magnitude Estimation scale. We explicate the principles according to which the different types of variation can be considered information about mental representation, and we show how they can be used to test hypotheses regarding linguistic representations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Alex Kelly ◽  
Yang Xu ◽  
Jesús Calvillo ◽  
David Reitter

Recent models of language have eliminated syntactic-semantic dividing lines. We explore the psycholinguistic implications of this development by comparing different types of sentence embeddings in their ability to encode syntactic constructions. Our study uses contrasting sentence structures known to cause syntactic priming effects, that is, the tendency in humans to re- peat sentence structures after recent exposure. We compare how syntactic alternatives are captured by sentence embed- dings produced by a neural language model (BERT) or by the composition of word embeddings (BEAGLE, HHM, GloVe). Dative double object vs. prepositional object and active vs. passive sentences are separable in the high-dimensional space of the sentence embeddings and can be classified with a high degree of accuracy. The results lend empirical support to the modern, computational, integrated accounts of semantics and syntax, and they shed light on the information stored at different layers in deep language models such as BERT.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 460-472
Author(s):  
Natalya M Nesterova ◽  
Evgeniya A Naugolnykh

The paper deals with studying language deviations of different types in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . Deviations in general are known to be a departure from a norm or accepted standard; in linguistics deviations are viewed as an artistic device that can be applied in different forms and at various textual levels. The author’s language deformation is analyzed as a form of deviation used for expressing the writer’s language knowledge. It is concluded that in Ulysses the destruction of the language is thoroughly thought out and multi-aimed. For instance, occasional compound units that dominate the novel imitate the style of Homer, reviving the ancient manner in contemporary language. Despite the use of conventional word-building patterns, rich semantic abundance being the basic principle of Joyce's poetics seriously complicates interpretation of the new words in the source language. The attempt is also made to systematize deviation techniques in Finnegans Wake . In particular, multilinguality is found to be the base of the lexical units created by J. Joyce. Such hybrid nonce words produce the polyphony effect and trigger the mechanism of polysemantism together with unlimited associativity of the textual material, broadening the boundaries of linguistic knowledge as a whole. Additionally, certain results of a deeper comparative analysis of the ways to translate the author’s deviations into Russian are given. The analysis of three Russian versions of Ulysses and the experimental fragmentary translation of Finnegans Wake show that there exists some regularity in the choice of translation method, particularly its dependence on the structural similarities/ differences of the source and the target languages, as well as the language levels affected by J. Joyce in the process of lingual destruction. The impossibility of complete conveyance of the semantic depth of the text and stylistic features in the target language is noted.


2021 ◽  
Vol 05 (03) ◽  
pp. 12-14
Author(s):  
Ashok Kumar Priydarshi ◽  

Irony in its broadest sense, is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or event in which what on the surface appears to be the case or to be expected differs radically from what is actually the case. In other words, the basic feature of irony is a contrast between reality and appearance. It can be categorized into different types, including verbal irony, dramatic irony and situational irony. These types of ironies are often used for emphasis in the assertion of a truth. Jane Austen uses all these ironies in her novels to show the comic vision of her life. She has used it as a neutral discoverer and explorer of incongruities.


2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewa Wałaszewska

The goal of the paper is to show that relevance theory provides a theoretically sound framework for describing properties of expressions traditionally known as hedges in a consistent manner. In relevance-theoretic terms, hedges may be regarded as special linguistic expressions developed to guide hearers in the interpretation process, indicating the need for adjusting lexically encoded concepts. A closer look at several representative hedges: sort of, like, typical, regular and real, reveals that hedges may be re-classified according to how they interact with ad hoc concepts. Whether they are conceptual or procedural, hedges may signal: broadening (sort of, regular, real), narrowing (typical) or either of these processes (like). With regard to broadening, it turns out that at least two different types of this process may be distinguished, illustrated by the hedges sort of and regular/real, which introduce approximations and metaphors, respectively. It is also proposed that the classification should be expanded to accommodate Lasersohn’s “slack regulators” such as exactly (and possibly very) as expressions encoding a procedure to restrict the extent of broadening. Finally, properties and behaviour of different types of hedges may shed some light on the nature of procedural meaning.


2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 883-899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hagoort

This study investigated the effects of combined semantic and syntactic violations in relation to the effects of single semantic and single syntactic violations on language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effects (N400 and P600/ SPS). Syntactic violations consisted of a mismatch in grammatical gender or number features of the definite article and the noun in sentence-internal or sentence-final noun phrases (NPs). Semantic violations consisted of semantically implausible adjective–noun combinations in the same NPs. Combined syntactic and semantic violations were a summation of these two respective violation types. ERPs were recorded while subjects read the sentences with the different types of violations and the correct control sentences. ERP effects were computed relative to ERPs elicited by the sentence-internal or sentence-final nouns. The size of the N400 effect to the semantic violation was increased by an additional syntactic violation (the syntactic boost). In contrast, the size of the P600/ SPS to the syntactic violation was not affected by an additional semantic violation. This suggests that in the absence of syntactic ambiguity, the assignment of syntactic structure is independent of semantic context. However, semantic integration is influenced by syntactic processing. In the sentence-final position, additional global processing consequences were obtained as a result of earlier violations in the sentence. The resulting increase in the N400 amplitude to sentence-final words was independent of the nature of the violation. A speeded anomaly detection task revealed that it takes substantially longer to detect semantic than syntactic anomalies. These results are discussed in relation to the latency and processing characteristics of the N400 and P600/SPS effects. Overall, the results reveal an asymmetry in the interplay between syntax and semantics during on-line sentence comprehension.


Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Schmid

AbstractLanguages are subject to change, but they are also stable. The linguistic knowledge of the members of speech communities is similar, but also differs in many ways. Language use affects individual linguistic knowledge and contributes to linguistic conventionality. The present paper outlines a model of how language works that strives to do justice to these commonsensical observations. The model consists of cognitive processes and social processes and shows how these interact under the influence of usage events and a range of different types of forces.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Kumiko Murasugi ◽  
Monica Ittusardjuat

The traditional method of orally transmitting language is weakening with the passing of fluent Elders and language erosion in contemporary Inuit society. Language documentation is a vital component of language maintenance and revitalization. In this paper we present a pilot online, multimedia cybercartographic Atlas of the Inuit Language in Canada, the goal of which is to help protect and strengthen the vitality of Inuit dialects through the documentation of their words. The main component of the atlas is a multidialectal database of written and spoken words. We discuss the role of dictionaries in language documentation, introduce the features of the atlas, explore the appeal of the atlas to different types of users (in particular, language learners), and present future directions for the atlas project.


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