“Well would you believe it, I have failed the exam again”

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Augustin Speyer ◽  
Anita Fetzer
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Context Dependence ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Discourse Relations ◽  
Discourse Connectives ◽  
German Data

Abstract This paper compares the linguistic realization of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations in English and German short personal narratives, paying particular attention to the context-dependence of (1) their overt marking with discourse connectives, and (2) their adjacent and non-adjacent positioning. The analysis is based on 20 written texts collected from university students. The use of discourse connectives with adjacently and non-adjacently positioned discourse relations is more frequent in the English data. Considering the sentence as the unit of investigation, the coordinating relations of Contrast and Result and the subordinating relation of Explanation are marked overtly throughout the English data, while coordinating Narration and Background, and subordinating Elaboration and Comment relations are marked overtly less frequently. The picture is roughly similar with clauses as units of investigation. In the German data, the use of discourse connectives is also more frequent irrespective of adjacently or non-adjacently positioned discourse relations.

Discourse connectives across languages

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandrine Zufferey
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Implicit Communication ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Coherence Relations ◽  
Discourse Relations ◽  
Discourse Interpretation ◽  
Target Languages ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Discourse Connectives

Coherence relations linking discourse segments can be communicated explicitly by the use of connectives but also implicitly through juxtaposition. Some discourse relations appear, however, to be more coherent than others when conveyed implicitly. This difference is explained in the literature by the existence of default expectations guiding discourse interpretation. In this paper, we assess the factors influencing implicitation by comparing the number of implicit and explicit translations of three polysemous French connectives in translated texts across three target languages: German, English and Spanish. Each connective can convey two discourse relations: one that can easily be conveyed implicitly and one that cannot be easily conveyed implicitly in monolingual data. Results indicate that relations that can easily be conveyed implicitly are also those that are most often left implicit in translation in all target languages. We discuss these results in view of the cognitive factors influencing the explicit or implicit communication of discourse relations.

scholarly journals A PDTB-styled end-to-end discourse parser

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZIHENG LIN ◽  
HWEE TOU NG ◽  
MIN-YEN KAN
Keyword(s):  
Comprehensive Evaluation ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Pipeline Architecture ◽  
Multiple Components ◽  
Current State ◽  
Discourse Relations ◽  
Data Driven Approach ◽  
End To End ◽  
Discourse Connectives

AbstractSince the release of the large discourse-level annotation of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), research work has been carried out on certain subtasks of this annotation, such as disambiguating discourse connectives and classifying Explicit or Implicit relations. We see a need to construct a full parser on top of these subtasks and propose a way to evaluate the parser. In this work, we have designed and developed an end-to-end discourse parser-to-parse free texts in the PDTB style in a fully data-driven approach. The parser consists of multiple components joined in a sequential pipeline architecture, which includes a connective classifier, argument labeler, explicit classifier, non-explicit classifier, and attribution span labeler. Our trained parser first identifies all discourse and non-discourse relations, locates and labels their arguments, and then classifies the sense of the relation between each pair of arguments. For the identified relations, the parser also determines the attribution spans, if any, associated with them. We introduce novel approaches to locate and label arguments, and to identify attribution spans. We also significantly improve on the current state-of-the-art connective classifier. We propose and present a comprehensive evaluation from both component-wise and error-cascading perspectives, in which we illustrate how each component performs in isolation, as well as how the pipeline performs with errors propagated forward. The parser gives an overall system F1 score of 46.80 percent for partial matching utilizing gold standard parses, and 38.18 percent with full automation.

Audiovisual translation (dubbing and audio description) as a didactic tool to promote foreign language learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Vermeulen ◽  
María Ángeles Escobar-Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
University Students ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
Native Students ◽  
Clitic Doubling ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Audio Description ◽  
Audiovisual Translation

Abstract This empirical study focuses on the use of Spanish clitic pronouns when they function as accusative or as dative clitics in the translation tasks performed by university students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). The participants were 35 Belgian Dutch-speaking students of SFL (Level B2) from the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication of Ghent University (Belgium), who are enrolled in the Translation course. They were asked to perform two tasks: (1) to create an audio description script in Spanish, and (2) to translate the English dialogues into Spanish from a sequence taken from the film The Help (Taylor 2011). The written texts they produced were compared to those written by 39 Erasmus Spanish native students, who carried out the same tasks. The results showed that the Belgian students produced significantly fewer clitic pronouns, especially in the case of dative clitic doubling, than those produced by the Spanish natives. As for the differences between the two modes of audiovisual translation, the findings revealed that the Belgians produced more accurate results in the interlingual than in the intersemiotic task. The results of our study also made it clear that more attention should be paid to the use of redundant clitic pronouns in the SFL classroom.

Informativeness and explicit linking in the translation of the English V-ing free adjuncts into Catalan

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Espunya
Keyword(s):  
Source Text ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
Present Participle ◽  
Discourse Relations ◽  
Pragmatic Principle ◽  
Discourse Connectives

This paper reports on a study designed to assess the influence of the pragmatic Principle of Informativeness on the translatorial strategy of explicitation. It replicates a previous study on the occurrence of conjunctional augmentation of English present participle free adjuncts in a monolingual corpus (Kortmann 1991), with a database of translation instances from English into Catalan. The study aims at testing the validity of Kortmann’s scale of informativeness of semantic / discourse relations (e.g. Condition, Cause, Simultaneity, etc.) as a (partial) account of explicitation by means of sentence and discourse connectives. The methodology is text-based and involves collecting a database of pairs of sequences (English source text, Catalan translation), identifying the most plausible interpretation between free adjunct and matrix clause, and classifying them into instances that have undergone explicitation vs. non-explicitation. The data are analysed quantitatively (by finding the percentages of explicitation per relationship) as well as qualitatively (by analysing the kinds of semantic shifts that occur between source texts and translations).

scholarly journals Topiks im Deutschen und Italienischen

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 (6) ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Federica Cognola ◽  
Manuela Caterina Moroni
Keyword(s):  
Initial Position ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Fixed Order ◽  
The Difference ◽  
German Data ◽  
Finite Verb

The aim of this paper is i) to investigate the distribution of different topic types in the highest portion (found above valutative adverbs such as glücklicherweise and leider, Cinque 1999) of the German Mittelfeld, i. e. the clause portion found between the finite and non-finite verb forms (Satzklammer), and ii) to compare it with the distribution of topics within the Italian left periphery, i. e. the area found above the finite verb where operators, focalised and topicalised constructions are hosted (Rizzi 1997; Benincà 1988, 2001). Based on a corpus of written and oral German data collected through the DeReKO and the FOLK Databases, we show that in German i) in both written and oral examples a single topic belonging to all topic classes can appear in the highest portion of the Mittelfeld (as proposed by Frascarelli/Hinterhölzl 2007), ii) and that multiple topics are restricted to written texts and appear with the fixed order “Aboutness Topic > Familiar Topic; Aboutness Topic > Contrast Topic”. We compare the distribution of topics above valutative adverbs in German with the distribution of topics in the Italian left periphery. We show that the two languages share the fact that multiple topics are possible, with the difference that i) three topics can appear in the Italian left periphery in the order Aboutness Topic > Contrast Topic > Familiar Topic whereas only sequences of two topics are attested in German; ii) the sentence-initial position functions as an “extra” position for topics in German but not in Italian due to the V2 nature of the former language; iii) the presence of multiple topics in the left periphery is restricted to oral or informal texts in Italian and it is a typical trait of colloquial/informal language, whereas the availability of multiple topics in the German Mittefeld is restricted to written/formal texts and can thus be seen as a written/formal trait.

scholarly journals Discourse Relations and Connectives in Higher Text Structure

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Lucie Polakova ◽  
Jiří Mírovský ◽  
Šárka Zikánová ◽  
Eva Hajičová
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Text Structure ◽  
Discourse Structure ◽  
The Third ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Global Coherence ◽  
Discourse Relations ◽  
Semantic Types ◽  
Discourse Connectives

The present article investigates possibilities and limits of local (shallow) analysis of discourse coherence with respect to the phenomena of global coherence and higher composition of texts. We study corpora annotated with local discourse relations in Czech and partly in English to try and find clues in the local annotation indicating a higher discourse structure. First, we classify patterns of subsequent or overlapping pairs of local relations, and hierarchies formed by nested local relations. Special attention is then given to relations crossing paragraph boundaries and their semantic types, and to paragraph-initial discourse connectives. In the third part, we examine situations in which annotators incline to marking a large argument (larger than one sentence) of a discourse relation even with a minimality principle annotation rule in place. Our analyses bring (i) new linguistic insights regarding coherence signals in local and higher contexts, e.g. detection and description of hierarchies of local discourse relations up to 5 levels in Czech and English, description of distribution differences in semantic types in cross-paragraph and other settings, identification of Czech connectives only typical for higher structures, or the detection of prevalence of large left-sided arguments in locally annotated data; (ii) as another type of contribution, some new reflections on methodologies of the approaches under scrutiny.

scholarly journals Representaciones, hábitos y dificultades de composición del texto escrito en estudiantes universitarios: un estudio exploratorio

2017 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Yolanda Álvarez-Sánchez ◽  
Santiago Fabregat-Barrios
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
University Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Estudiantes Universitarios

This article presents an exploratory study into the assumptions, habits of composition and principal difficulties that university students in the study declare to have in regard to the composition of written texts. It is a qualitative study elaborated from a series of semi-structured interviews used as a method of data collection. Once the analysis and categorisation of the data is complete, we present the system of beliefs of the participants regarding professional and academic writing. We identified their most relevant difficulties and make clear what must be taken into consideration when proposing actions which objective is to improve writing competencies in the area of Tertiary Education.

scholarly journals Lexical and Structural Cues to Discourse Processing in First and Second Language

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludivine Crible ◽  
Mathis Wetzel ◽  
Sandrine Zufferey
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Discourse Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Discourse Relations ◽  
Reading Patterns ◽  
Discourse Connectives

Discourse connectives are lexical items like “but” and “so” that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants.

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