American Dream Revisited: A Media Discourse Representation in Cognitive-linguistic Perspective

Considered in cognitive-linguistic perspective, “American Dream” is a represented in media discourse stereotype that embodies ideal of happiness in a prosperous democratic society. The research methodology rests on the premise of cognitive-linguistic approach to study of sociocultural stereotypes, which are seen as complex phenomena of social and cultural experience, manifested in behavioural, material, and verbal codes. Methodological tools of discursive and corpus analysis proved the variability of meaning of the stereotype. In the course of time, it shows semantic changes, conditioned by socio-economic and cultural factors. Empirical study eventuates in distinguishing three periods that correlate with transformation of the stereotype. The period of formation outlines the ideal of freedom and equality. The next period, which started in the 1950s, manifested changes toward obtaining happiness only in virtue of wealth. In recent years, “American Dream” is being associated more with freedom of choice than mere financial success.

Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources

A fictional text is commonly viewed as constituting an invitation to play a certain game of make-believe, with the individual sentences written by the author providing the propositions we are to imagine and/or accept as true within the fiction. However, we can’t always take the text at face value. What narratologists call ‘unreliable narrators’ may present a confused or misleading picture of the fictional world. Meanwhile, there has been a debate in philosophy about ‘imaginative resistance’ in which we resist imagining (or even accepting as true in the fiction) what’s explicitly stated in the text. But if we can’t take the text’s word for it, how do we determine what’s true in a fiction? The chapter proposes an account of fiction interpretation in a dynamic setting (a version of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) with a mechanism for opening, updating, and closing temporary ‘workspaces’) and combines this framework with belief revision logic.

Review Essay

This review of two recent books, with further discussion of a third, addresses questions of the direction of democracy and the impacts of media circulation and data extraction on democratic culture. The reviewed books are Selena Nemorin (2018). Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing: World, Discourse, Representation, and Dipankar Sinha (2018). The Information Game in Democracy, with discussion also of Peter Csigo (2016). The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on “the People” in Late Modern Democracy.

Alguns adjuntos temporais com especial relevância para a tradução inglês-português: o caso de since-desde e expressões afins

This paper addresses the semantic analysis of polyvalent temporal adjuncts headed by (mainly) English since and Portuguese desde, and problems in translation from English to Portuguese. Four semantic values of the single operator since are considered (the second and fourth of which are not normally considered autonomously in the English literature) – durative location, derived durative location (in association with adjunct-triggered Aktionsart shift), simple inclusive location and temporal circumscription of quantification. Furthermore, the typically monovalent phrase ever since and the bivalent phrase long since are also taken into account. The fact the Portuguese desde – contrary to English since – is not normally associated with simple inclusive locations is the source of many translation problems. Other interesting grammatical issues, involving long since, are also addressed. The translation data is obtained from the website linguee.com (where six different types of problems are found), and the semantic analysis is made with the logic of the Discourse Representation Theory, elaborating on my previous work, Móia (2000).

Quadronimic interpretation of English-language digital discourse

The paper focuses on the English-language digital discourse (EDD) and considers it in terms of Descartes’ square. Despite the incongruence of the medieval philosophical paradigm with the modern stage of posthumanitarian studies, it is the quadronymic and clearly delineated frame, “perspicuae veritates” (according to R. Descartes), which can balance a diverse phenomenon of digital discourse. There are three main aspects of the study considered further: English-language digital discourse and its quadronymic potential, which is interpreted in three main perspectives: in terms of discursive impulse and discourse response; within hyper- / hypodynamic levels of English-language digital discourse and the English-language digital textual space (EDTS). Quadrominic interpretation of English-language digital discourse results in the following findings: symmetry of discourse construction; logic and sequence of discourse representation and its parameters; slot representation of discourse paradigmatic parameters; identification of interdependencies, conditions and parameters of discourse within quadrants.

The New Perception of the Other in Chipilo, Mexico

This ethnographic work focuses on Chipilo, a bilingual immigrant community of Italian origin in Mexico that has managed to maintain its dialect and culture for more than six generations thanks to a strong sense and pride of its ethnic identity. Socioeconomic changes and increase in mixed marriages during the last twenty years have affected the process of identity construction. Starting with an analysis of the characteristics that have typically come to define identity and otherness, we examine the new perception of “the other” from the internal perspective of the community. Data derived from a corpus of interviews provide grounds to claim the emergence of a different discourse representation of “otherness” among groups within the same community.

Universal Discourse Representation Structure Parsing

We consider the task of cross-lingual semantic parsing in the style of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) where knowledge from annotated corpora in a resource-rich language is transferred via bitext to guide learning in other languages. We introduce Universal Discourse Representation Theory (UDRT), a variant of DRT that explicitly anchors semantic representations to tokens in the linguistic input. We develop a semantic parsing framework based on the Transformer architecture and employ it to obtain semantic resources in multiple languages following two learning schemes. The Many-to-One approach translates non-English text to English, and then runs a relatively accurate English parser on the translated text, while the One-to-Many approach translates gold standard English to non-English text and trains multiple parsers (one per language) on the translations. Experimental results on the Parallel Meaning Bank show that our proposal outperforms strong baselines by a wide margin and can be used to construct (silver-standard) meaning banks for 99 languages.