scholarly journals On Referential Distance in Written Texts

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 76
Author(s):  
Jelena Š. Novaković ◽  
Božana Tomić
Keyword(s):  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Special Regard ◽  
Written Texts

Apart from personal pronouns which are by far the most used referring expressions in English and Serbian, reference can be established and maintained using demonstratives. Their function is to refer to the location or distance of a person or an object. The aim of this paper is to examine reference realised by demonstratives with special regard to the restrictions written discourse imposes on their usage. The texts we used for analysis are narrative stories written in the two languages.

Imperative in English Proverbs

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doc. Dr. Jelena Š. Novaković ◽  
PhD student Božana Tomić
Keyword(s):  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Special Regard

Apart from personal pronouns which are by far the most used referring expressions in English and Serbian, reference can be established and maintained using demonstratives.Their function is to refer to the location or distance of a person or an object. The aim of this paper is to examine reference realised by demonstratives with special regard to the restrictions written discourse imposes on their usage. The texts we used for analysis are narrative stories written in the two languages.

Shell nouns as register-specific discourse devices

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Chengyu Fang ◽  
Min Dong
Keyword(s):  
Past Research ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
British English ◽  
Small Core ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Core Set ◽  
Mode Of Production ◽  
Shell Nouns

Abstract This article provides a corpus-based investigation into shell nouns. Shell nouns perform a variety of referential functions and express speaker stance. The investigation was motivated by the fact that past research in this area has been primarily based on written texts. Very little is known about the use of shell nouns in speech. The study used the ICE-GB corpus of contemporary British English and investigated cataphoric shell nouns complemented by appositive that-clauses across fine-grained spoken and written registers. It has revealed that the deployment of shell nouns is governed by the principle of register formality definable in terms of contextual configurations of the Field-Tenor-Mode complex rather than the mode of production. Additionally, the study has uncovered the frequent use of a small core set of shell nouns common across speech and writing. Hence it argues that shell nouns are part and parcel of spoken and written discourse and that they pertain more to grammar than to lexis.

Topic-Continuity and Topic-Shift Effects in Spanish Discourse

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Iker Zulaica-Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Narrow View ◽  
Topic Shift ◽  
Syntactic Prominence ◽  
Previous Sentence

Differences in use among referring expressions are usually explained on the basis of the cognitive accessibility of their antecedents, where antecedent accessibility has been operationalized differently in the literature; i.e. as a grammatical role, as syntactic prominence or as antecedent distance. On these grounds, it has been proposed that personal pronouns prefer topical antecedents whereas demonstratives prefer non-topical antecedents. This paper investigates the referring properties of Spanish demonstratives and direct object personal pronouns with the aim to unveil their differences and similarities. My analysis shows that these two expressions are very similar referentially when a narrow view of discourse context is considered. However, important differences show up when a broader notion of context is thrown into the picture; i.e. contexts that extend beyond the immediate previous sentence and beyond the immediate local topic of discourse. Based on my corpus evidence and on previous research on the pragmatic interpretation of referring expressions, I claim that direct object personal pronouns and demonstrative noun phrases crucially differ in the way they contribute to discourse coherence; the former playing the role of topic continuity markers and the latter focalising referents that reintroduce suspended or declining topics and marking (sub)-topic shifts in the discourse.

scholarly journals EXPLORING INTERPERSONAL INTERACTION IN WRITTEN DISCOURSE

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Risdaneva Risdaneva
Keyword(s):  
Writing Process ◽  
Interpersonal Interaction ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Written Texts

The purpose of any discourses, either spoken or written ones, is to communicate the messages to the targeted audiences. Written discourse appears to be the most cau-tious piece of work since it is a product of a well-organised and long-term writing process. To achieve the communicative purpose, an author should interpersonally interact with the targeted readers. The interpersonal interaction can be realised through the use of modalisation to express certainty and uncertainty as well as the use of attitudinal evaluation to evaluate things, events, people, situations and etc. In this case, the analysis of some extracts which are produced as guidelines for the teachers suggest that the written texts are quite convincing and evaluative as well as successful in persuading the readers. This is typical to this genre of discourse as its ultimate goal is to win over the interest of the reader in using the product. In other word, the author tries to make the text convincing and persuasive in order to win over the teachers’ interest in using the textbook in their classrooms.

scholarly journals The use of co-textual irony markers in written discourse

2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Burgers ◽  
Margot van Mulken ◽  
Peter Jan Schellens
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Verbal Irony ◽  
Support Strategies ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
Film Reviews

AbstractAuthors of written texts may mark the use of verbal irony in a variety of ways. One possibility for doing so is the use of so-called co-textual markers of irony (i.e., support strategies that open up a non-serious frame). This study aims to classify and categorize these co-textual irony markers. A content analysis of 2,042 co-textual utterances of irony across four text genres (advertisements, newspaper columns, book and film reviews, and letters to the editor) shows that three categories of support strategies could be identified: other ironic utterances, tropes and mood markers. The use of irony support strategies was positively related to the genre of newspaper columns: columns used more ironic utterances and tropes as irony support strategies than the other genres in the corpus.

scholarly journals Event and Entity Coreference Across Five Languages: Effects of Context and Referring Expression

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-226
Author(s):  
Luca Bevacqua ◽  
Sharid Loáiciga ◽  
Hannah Rohde ◽  
Christian Hardmeier
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Statistical Significance ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Multiple Languages

Current work on coreference focuses primarily on entities, often leaving unanalysed the use of anaphors to corefer with antecedents such as events and textual segments. Moreover, the anaphoric forms that speakers use for entity and non-entity coreference are not mutually exclusive. This ambiguity has been the subject of recent work in English, with evidence of a split between comprehenders' preferential interpretation of personal versus demonstrative pronouns. In addition, comprehenders are shown to be sensitive to antecedent complexity and aspectual status, two verb-driven cues that signal how an event is being portrayed. Here we extend this work via a comparison across five languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish). With a story-continuation experiment, we test how different referring expressions corefer with entity and event antecedents and whether verbal features such as argument structure and aspect influence this choice. Our results show widely consistent, not categorical biases across languages: entity coreference is favoured for personal pronouns and event coreference for demonstratives. Antecedent complexity increases the rate at which anaphors are taken to corefer with an event antecedent, but portraying an event as completed does not reach statistical significance (though showing quite uniform patterns). Lastly, we report a comparison of the same referring expressions to refer to entity and event antecedents in a trilingual parallel corpus annotated with coreference.Together, the results provide a first crosslingual picture of coreference preferences beyond the restricted entity-only patterns targeted by most existing work on coreference. The five languages are all shown to allow gradable use of pronouns for entity and event coreference, with biases that align with existing generalizations about the link between prominence and the use of reduced referring expressions. The studies also show the feasibility of manipulating targeted verb-driven cues across multiple languages to support crosslingual comparisons.

scholarly journals Register, genre and referential ambiguity of personal pronouns

Pragmatics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara De Cock
Keyword(s):  
Oral Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Power Relationship ◽  
Subjective Effect ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Teacher Student ◽  
Referential Ambiguity ◽  
Suitable Explanation

This paper argues for revisiting the traditional adscription of ambiguous readings of personal pronouns, such as hearer-dominant we or generic you, pluralis maiestatis and pluralis modestiae to specific genres and/or registers. Indeed, in many languages these phenomena are considered typical for a certain genre, register or discourse context. In this paper, I will argue, on the basis of quantitative data and a qualitative analysis of examples taken from different genres (including purposefully creative language use in fiction), that a more accurate account may be formulated in terms of (inter)subjective effect, viz. the attention to the (inter)locutor (among others Benveniste 1966), as a more suitable explanation for the variation of these phenomena attested in corpora.The hearer-oriented uses of we, for instance, are considered typical for relationships characterized by power asymmetries such as teacher-student, doctor-patient (Haverkate 1984: 87; Brown & Levinson 1987), whereas generic and speaker-referring you have been considered a feature of (informal) oral language than written discourse (Hidalgo Navarro 1996). Recent corpus-based analyses including quantitative and qualitative analyses, however, call for a more nuanced view (De Cock 2011 on Spanish and English; Tarenskeen 2010 on Dutch). We may, for example, find hearer-oriented or even hearer-dominant 1st person plural forms (Have we taken our medicine?) in contexts where no power- relationship can be defined, e.g. among couples.It will be shown that these uses have different intersubjective effects, however. Their distribution is in line with overall differences as to intersubjectivity according to register and genre, beyond referential ambiguity. The concept of (inter)subjectivity then allows for a more comprehensive analysis of these phenomena and their occurrence in specific registers and genres, addressing the way in which the (inter)locutor is taken into account in each genre.

scholarly journals Children's use of referring expressions: some implications for theory of mind

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Jeanette K. Gundel ◽  
Dimitris Ntelitheos ◽  
Melinda Kowalsky
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Reading Ability ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Mind Reading ◽  
Epistemic States ◽  
Develop Theory ◽  
Two Stages

This paper presents results of corpus analytic investigations of children's use of referring expressions and considers possible implications of this work for questions relating to development of theory of mind. The study confirms previous findings that children use the full range of referring forms (definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative determiners, and demonstrative and personal pronouns) appropriately by age 3 or earlier. It also provides support for two distinct stages in mind-reading ability. The first, which is implicit and non-propositional, includes the ability to assess cognitive statuses such as familiarity and focus of attention in relation to the intended referent; the second, which is propositional and more conscious, includes the ability to assess epistemic states such as knowledge and belief. Distinguishing these two stages supports attempts to reconcile seemingly inconsistent results concerning the age at which children develop theory of mind. It also makes it possible to explain why children learn to use forms correctly be-fore they exhibit the pragmatic ability to consider and calculate quantity implicatures.  

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