Pronoun interpretation in Italian: assessing the effects of prosody

In this paper, we offer a prosodic account to supplement some well-known findings relating to choice of antecedents for pronouns in Italian. We argue that methodologies previously used to assess pronoun interpretation are flawed in that they rely only on written language to assess interpretation. In biclausal sentences like (1a), null pronouns are preferred when the antecedent is the discourse topic and subject of a higher clause; otherwise, overt pronouns are preferred. Sorace and Filiaci (2006) and Belletti et al. (2007) report that second language (L2) speakers of Italian overuse overt pronouns in contexts where null pronouns would be appropriate; they attribute this overuse to problems at the syntax-discourse interface (a failure to fully appreciate the discourse requirements on overt pronouns) and/or to processing problems relating to the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS) proposed by Carminati (2002). In addition to the behaviour of the L2ers with respect to overt pronouns, there are some puzzling results in this literature: both native speakers and L2ers fail to perform as expected with null pronouns, allowing them to take object antecedents about 50% of the time.

Strategic Importance of Valorizing Discourse in the Subject Sphere of Innovation

The article focuses on the study of strategic importance as a qualitative category of discourse, characterizing the promotion of significant meaning in an axiologically parametrized media space. As part of the discursivization trajectory model, which was justified in line with a dynamic approach to the discourse study using the methods of inferential and interpretative analysis, the strategic nature of media discourse is set. It is organized by targeted, relevant important concept of "Innovation" as well as the ways of its implementation in axiological strategies. The type of discourse topic and intentionality of promoting significant meaning in the vector from the world of real to the world of proper and desired endow this discourse with a valorizing, constructive and prescriptive character. The projected axiological strategies and tactics contribute to rethinking and enriching the structure of the concept of "Innovation". In the prevailing strategy of negative valorization, in the tactics of devalorizing evaluation nomination of innovations as a realized phenomenon, axiological oppositions, metaphorization, disursivization is focused on the prototypical maximum of the concept of "Innovation" in contrasting "truly innovative – declared innovative" in the world of action. In the structure of the concept, based on a sustainable view of innovation as a means of modernization, actual new homeostatic nodes are being formed. They link development, progress and openness, inevitability of innovations and readiness to implement them.

Sexist hate speech: Topical organization of intolerant discourse

The article is aimed at determining the topical structure of sexist hate speech as a form of intolerant discourse. Sexist hate speech is viewed as a type of gender-based hate speech that is influenced by the same social, political and legal, cultural and ethical factors as sexual orientation-based or gender identity-based hate speech. The article proposes a topical structure of hate speech in general and provides examples of sexist hate speech topics and subtopics in Belarusian online discourse. Keywords: hate speech, sexist hate speech, gender-based hate speech, discourse of hate, intolerant discourse, online discourse, topic.

The Named Jew and the Name of God

A connection between Paul’s charges against his interlocutor in Rom 2:21–22 and Josephus’s account of a notorious Jewish teacher in Rome (A.J. 18.81–84) is a catalyst for re-examining the purpose, topic, and argument of Rom 2:17–29. The foreground issue is not the soteriological status of Jews, but the effectiveness of typical Jewish law-based teaching to solve human foolishness, wickedness, and impiety. Paul reframes the discourse topic to demonstrate that typical Jewish law-based educational activity is ineffective in bringing about God’s glory among the nations. The interlocutor is thus a foil for Paul’s own eschatologically conceived apostolic ministry.

Zum Zusammenspiel von Erzähler- und Protagonistenperspektive in den Brenner-Romanen von Wolf Haas

In this paper I show that a close look at the use of demonstrative pronouns (DPros) of the der/die/das paradigm in the crime novel Auferstehung der Toten (‘Resurrection of the dead’) by Wolf Haas allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay of the narrator’s and the main protagonist’s perspective in narrative texts. At the same time, it provides an indirect argument against the assumption that the distribution of DPros can be fully derived from anti-logophoricity (Hinterwimmer and Bosch 2017) and in favor of an analysis sketched as an alternative in that paper: DPros avoid maximally prominent discourse referents as antecedents, where not only protagonists, but also narrators can be discourse referents. In text segments where the narrator’s perspective becomes prominent in virtue of evaluations, comments etc., the narrator is the maximally prominent discourse referent, while in text segments involving Free Indirect Discourse or other forms of protagonist’s perspective-taking such as Protagonist Projection (Holton 1997, Stokke 2013) or Viewpoint Shifting (Hinterwimmer 2017), the respective protagonist is the maximally prominent discourse referent. Finally, in text segments involving neutral narration where neither the narrator’s nor a protagonist’s perspective is salient, the respective discourse topic is the maximally prominent discourse referent.

Research on Chinese Question-Answering for Gaokao Based on Graph

Reading comprehension Question-Answering (QA) for College Entrance Examination (Gaokao in Chinese) is a challenging AI task because it requires effective representation to capture complicated semantic relations between the question and answers. In this paper, a novel method of Chinese Automatic Question-Answering based on a graph is proposed. The method first uses the Chinese FrameNet and discourse topic (paragraph topic sentence and author’s opinion sentence) to construct the affinity matrix between the question and candidate sentences and then employs the algorithm based on the graph to iteratively calculate the importance of each sentence. At last, the top 6 candidate answer sentences are selected based on the ranking scores. The recall on Beijing College Entrance Examination in the recent twelve years is 67.86%, which verifies the effectiveness of the method.

Eerstezinsdeeldeletie in het Nederlands : Wat topicdrop wél en wat het níet is

First-constituent-deletion in Dutch. What topic drop is and what it is notThis paper discusses the phenomenon of pronoun deletion in Dutch. In the position before the finite verb a 3rd person pronoun may be deleted. The deletion of the pronoun is constrained by the recoverability condition, which requires that its referential features can be reconstructed from the context. It will be argued that only the deletion of a d(emonstrative)-pronoun is ‘topic drop’, which is typical for spoken Dutch. Deleted topic d-pronouns are subject to the same syntactic conditions as overt topic d-pronouns (Van Kampen 2010). Like the overt topic d-pronoun, the deleted d-pronoun refers to the focus constituent of the preceding sentence. A deleted p(ersonal)-pronoun, by contrast, does not have a uniquely determined antecedent and therefore it cannot be analyzed as discourse topic drop. In written texts, it solely maintains the preceding subject referent. I will further discuss the deletion of 1st person pronouns and the deletion of d-pronouns in imperatives.

The Acquisition of Null Subjects in Standard Arabic by Native Speakers of English

This paper investigates the acquisition of the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic properties of null subjects in Standard Arabic (SA) by native speakers of English. Ninety participants from intermediate and advanced levels participated in a questionnaire, which aimed to investigate their knowledge on the occurrence of null subjects in SA. The results show that native speakers of English with regard to missing subject and free inversion face no difficulty in the acquisition of the syntactic properties of the null subject parameter in SA; however, they have difficulties in the acquisition of that-trace effect. In terms of discourse-pragmatic properties, the results of the study illustrate that they can also easily acquire the discourse topic and pragmatic anaphora properties of null subjects in SA. Keywords: Null Subjects, free inversion, that-trace effect, discourse topic, pragmatic anaphora, parameter.