scholarly journals The hidden side of adverbs

2018 ◽  
Vol 92 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ignazio Mauro Mirto

This paper will address the predicative nature of manner adverb(ial)s and of three types of sentence adverbs (subject-oriented, modal, and evaluative) in Italian. Predication often becomes overt by means of morphological correlates. Is it possible to find any such evidence with invariable adverbs? To unveil their predicative nature, a procedure will be suggested in which two sentences, one with a -mente adverb, the other with its cognate adjective (a) share the content morphemes (identity of the signifiant) and (b) entail each other (identity of the signifié as regards semantic roles). A number of such pairs will be discussed, examples of which include: Intelligentemente, Leo intervenne ‘Cleverly, Leo intervened’ and Leo fu intelligente a intervenire ‘Leo was clever to intervene’. We aim to ascertain if the argument structure of the adjective and the semantic role(s) which it assigns can shed light on the very same properties of the cognate adverb.

Author(s):  
Tyler Peterson

The Tsimshianic languages are entirely morphologically ergative in the agreement system. While there is a split in Tsimshianic, conditioned by both clause type and a person hierarchy, the other side of the split is not the expected nominative-accusative alignment. Rather, other logical groupings of semantic roles are found that are still ergative. This chapter presents a description of the agreement patterns across Tsimshianic, with the aim of explaining these expansions of ergativity, by undertaking a comparative analysis of the individual languages in the Tsimshianic family. This is analysis is extended to the connectives, which are complex, determiner-like morphemes that appear to be sensitive to the semantic role of the NP. This leads to four distinct alignments (nominative, ergative, neutral, and contrastive). An understanding of the alignments in the agreement system can shed light on this complexity, and a comparative analysis eliminates the multiple alignments in the connective system, thus revealing a fairly standard set of determiners.


2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Milivoj Alanovic

Since the notions of semantic and syntactic coreference, in the conceptual, terminological and theoretical sense, have long been known to the linguistic public, we consider it appropriate and worthwhile to point out the ways in which this type of connection between the grammatical units in the sentence is materialized. We especially wanted to draw attention to the inherent mechanisms of language which directly signal that the two forms, not necessarily different, are connected with the same meaning, and related to the same semantic role, for which it is directly responsible - the same propositional function they have. Although it may seem that the difference between semantic and syntactic coreference is not so significant, it has been revealed that in the latter case, the syntactic relations are the main language means of expressing propositional functions and corresponding semantic roles. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to highlight the syntagmatic mechanisms of language, with the help of which the structural, informative and informative hierarchy of the sentence members is carried out. The purpose of such hierarchization is not so much to streamline or rethink the structure of the sentence, but rather to ensure the integration of complex content on the one hand, and settle the situational significance of individual participants on the other hand.


2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
NIANWEN XUE ◽  
MARTHA PALMER

AbstractWe report work on adding semantic role labels to the Chinese Treebank, a corpus already annotated with phrase structures. The work involves locating all verbs and their nominalizations in the corpus, and semi-automatically adding semantic role labels to their arguments, which are constituents in a parse tree. Although the same procedure is followed, different issues arise in the annotation of verbs and nominalized predicates. For verbs, identifying their arguments is generally straightforward given their syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank as they tend to occupy well-defined syntactic positions. Our discussion focuses on the syntactic variations in the realization of the arguments as well as our approach to annotating dislocated and discontinuous arguments. In comparison, identifying the arguments for nominalized predicates is more challenging and we discuss criteria and procedures for distinguishing arguments from non-arguments. In particular we focus on the role of support verbs as well as the relevance of event/result distinctions in the annotation of the predicate-argument structure of nominalized predicates. We also present our approach to taking advantage of the syntactic structure in the Chinese Treebank to bootstrap the predicate-argument structure annotation of verbs. Finally, we discuss the creation of a lexical database of frame files and its role in guiding predicate-argument annotation. Procedures for ensuring annotation consistency and inter-annotator agreement evaluation results are also presented.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-517
Author(s):  
Yuk Hui ◽  
Louis Morelle

This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed.


Author(s):  
Elena Lombardi

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.


2021 ◽  
pp. 109634802098727
Author(s):  
Josip Mikulić ◽  
Damir Krešić ◽  
Maja Šerić

The current study intends to contribute to a better understanding of the medical tourism experience. In particular, this study uses data from a survey-based study conducted on a sample of 1,209 medical tourists in Croatia. On the one hand, this study aims to explore and shed light on the decision-making process of medical tourists, and, on the other hand, to reveal which elements of both the medical institution and the destination where it is located, have largest potentials to drive medical tourist delight and/or frustration, in accordance with the three-factor theory of customer satisfaction.


Author(s):  
Juan P. Martínez ◽  
Inmaculada Méndez ◽  
Esther Secanilla ◽  
Ana Benavente ◽  
Julia García Sevilla

Starting from previous studies in professional caregivers of people with dementia and other diseases in institutionalized centers of different regions, the aim of this study was to compare burnout levels that workers present depending on the center, to create a caregiver profile with high professional accomplishment and to describe the quality of life that residents perceive Murcia and Barcelona. The instruments used were the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the Professional Caregiver Survey developed ad hoc and the Brief Questionnaire of Quality of Life (CUBRECAVI in Spanish) on residents. The results show, on the one hand, that levels of professional accomplishment may be paradoxically higher in the case of catastrophe and, on the other hand, the 98.2% of users are satisfied with the residence in which is located and 81.8% with the manner in which occupy the time. The conclusions that are extrapolated from the study shed light on the current situation of workers and residents and the influence that an earthquake can have on them.


2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Palmer ◽  
Daniel Gildea ◽  
Paul Kingsbury

The Proposition Bank project takes a practical approach to semantic representation, adding a layer of predicate-argument information, or semantic role labels, to the syntactic structures of the Penn Treebank. The resulting resource can be thought of as shallow, in that it does not represent coreference, quantification, and many other higher-order phenomena, but also broad, in that it covers every instance of every verb in the corpus and allows representative statistics to be calculated. We discuss the criteria used to define the sets of semantic roles used in the annotation process and to analyze the frequency of syntactic/semantic alternations in the corpus. We describe an automatic system for semantic role tagging trained on the corpus and discuss the effect on its performance of various types of information, including a comparison of full syntactic parsing with a flat representation and the contribution of the empty “trace” categories of the treebank.


1957 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 115-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Darby Nock

Towards the close of the Epitaphios of Libanius on Julian we read:–I have mentioned representations (of Julian); many cities have set him beside the images of the gods and honour him as they do the gods. Already a blessing has been besought of him in prayer, and it was not in vain. To such an extent has he literally ascended to the gods and received a share of their power from them themselves.The statement that Julian was made synnaos theos, or something of the sort, has many precedents. On the other hand, the assertion that he had hearkened to prayer calls for special consideration.


2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad

“Tell a man today to go and build a state,” Samuel Finer once stated, “and he will try to establish a definite and defensible boundary and compel those who live inside it to obey him.” While at best an oversimplification, Finer's insight illuminates an interesting aspect of state-society relations. Who is it that builds the state? How and where do they establish territorial boundaries, and how are those who live within that territory compelled to obey? Generally speaking, these are the questions that will be addressed here. Of more immediate concern is the fate of peoples located in regions where arbitrary land boundaries fall. Are they made loyal to the state through coercion or by their own compulsions? More importantly, how are their identities shaped by the efforts of the state to differentiate them from their compatriots on the other side of the borders? How is the shift from ethnic to national identities undertaken? A parallel elaboration of the national histories of the populations of Karelia and Moldova will shed light on these questions. The histories of each group are marked by a myriad of attempts to differentiate the identity of each ethnic community from their compatriots beyond the state's borders. The results of such overt, state-initiated efforts to differentiate borderland populations by encouraging a national identity at the expense of the ethnic, has ranged from the mundane to the tragic—from uneventful assimilation to persecution and even genocide. As an illustration of the range of possibilities and processes, I maintain that the tragedies of Karelia and Moldova are not exceptional, but rather are a consequence of their geographical straddling of arbitrary borders, and the need for the state to promote a distinctive national identity for these populations to differentiate them socially from their compatriots beyond the frontier.


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