FROM LINGUISTIC FEATURES TO CULTURAL PATTERNS

This article discusses the concept of reading and presents a method thatcombines distant and close reading, while drawing on insights fromcomputational humanities. Focusing on basic features in language, distantreading allows for the construction of new types of text. By close reading thesetexts, it is possible to analyse cultural patterns across individual texts. Thismethod of reading is illustrated by two cases stemming from a project basedon a corpus of 11,955 Danish sermons. The first case begins with a distantreading of gendered pronouns in the corpus. The second case begins with adistant reading of named agents.*

Introduction

Introduction

COMPUTING NUMERICAL IMAGES OF STUDENT WRITING

With the rapid increase in the number of available digital texts in schools, new methodological approaches to studying writing development in education are now emerging. However, with new methodological approaches follow new epistemological challenges. In this article, I examine some of these challenges and discuss how they affect the role of computational linguistics within the field of educational writing research. The article is structured around three main sections. First, I position computational linguistics within the wider field of educational writing research with particular focus on L1 writing and K12 education. Second, I discuss to what extent methods from computational linguistics can provide us with new insights into different aspects of educational writing. Third, I discuss the potential of the concept of affordance to bridge between technology-centered and human-centered methodological approaches, and I relate this idea to recent theoretical developments in the digital humanities. Based on this discussion, I conclude the article with suggestions for possible directions in future writing research.

MULTILINGUAL SENTIMENT NORMALIZATION FOR SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES

In this paper, we address the challenge of multilingual sentiment analysis using a traditional lexicon and rule-based sentiment instrument that is tailored to capture sentiment patterns in a particular language. Focusing on a case study of three closely related Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) and using three tailored versions of VADER, we measure the relative degree of variation in valence using the OPUS corpus. We found that scores for Swedish are systematically skewed lower than Danish for translational pairs, and that scores for Norwegian are skewed higher for both other languages. We use a neural network to optimize the fit between Norwegian and Swedish respectively and Danish as the reference (target) language.

The Grammar of Giants

It is a common process of language change for free morphemes to become bound morphemes, but the inverse process (termed ‘debonding’ by Norde 2009) is much rarer. Previous studies have found that lexemes with the original meaning ‘giant’ (German Riesen, Dutch reuze) have historically grammaticalized as prefixes, and subsequently debonded into free morphemes with the same bleached meaning as the prefixes (Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014; Norde & Van Goethem 2014). Using a synchronic corpus of written Danish (KorpusDK), this paper shows that the Danish word kæmpe, originally ‘giant’, is in the late stages of a similar process of debonding. By investigating the morphological and syntactic patterning of kæmpe, the paper shows that kæmpe has indeed debonded, and occurs as a free-standing semantically bleached adjective, but that it does not yet exhibit fully prototypical adjectival behavior. All three functions of kæmpe remain in use: a noun with the specific meaning ‘giant’, a semantically bleached prefix, and a corresponding semantically bleached adjective. This would argue against an account relying on abrupt category change, and it is proposed that kæmpe has reached its current status through gradual analogy-driven change.

Singular de and its referential use in talk-in-interaction

The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun – termed singular de – has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in- interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent’s gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which could be topics for future studies.

The Role of Recipient Questions in Establishing Intersubjectivity and Progressing a Story in Aided Communication

We report on a case study involving two participants: One participant has a communication disability and uses a high-tech, electronic device to speak, and the other is nondisabled. Their interaction differs from typical, everyday conversation because some linguistic resources are unavailable in aided speech, resulting in frequent repair sequences and slower progression. The analysis shows that when the aided speaker initiates an extended telling, the recipient uses questions to do repair-related actions as well as actions that could progress the story. Thus, this context affords the opportunity to investigate how the recipient’s projections interact with intersubjectivity and progressivity.

Questioning Questions in Language, Culture and Cognition

The motivation for questioning questions arose in the research group Language, Culture and Cognition in 2018 when several members were working on material that included questions. In this work, a series of problems appeared, including: How do we classify questions based on their functions? What is the cognitive basis for questions? How do we account for the specific functions that questions serve in activity types? The problems led to consideration as to whether there was a basis for a broader discussion of questions, and when the group invited to the open symposium Questioning Questions in Language, Culture and Cognition, it turned out that there was a widespread interest within the international linguistic research community. At the symposium held at Roskilde University on November 15, 2018, 14 papers were presented, and following the research group’s call for papers for a special issue, several new proposals came along - each contributing to the classification, analysis and characteriation of questions. This indicates not only that there is a lively interest in questions, but also that there is a need to discuss and add to the existing classifications, analyses and characterisations of questions. In this issue we have gathered the 11 most relevant contributions.

Expanding Searle’s analysis of interrogative speech acts: A systematic classification based on preparatory conditions

In John Searle’s original taxonomy of types of illocutionary acts (Searle 1969) he points out that some kinds of illocutionary acts are special cases of other kinds, giving the example that questions are in fact special cases of requests. In that way, a ‘real question’ is a request for information that the sender does not already possess, whereas an ‘exam question’ is a request for information that the sender has already access to. This paper takes this rudimentary analysis some steps further and attempts a taxonomy of interrogative speech acts based on sets of more specific preparatory conditions such as sender expects / does not expect reply and sender has access to / does not have access to the requested information. The paper will show that a system of these sets of preparatory conditions can generate illocutionary definitions of a range of different types of interrogative speech acts.

“It was probably that guy?” – The functions of reconstructive speech acts in investigative training interviews

This paper explores the pragmatic and interactional functions of reconstructive speech acts in mock police interviews, based on a model of argumentative dialogue. The aim of the paper is to illustrate how the reconstructions apparently contribute to both the interaction between the police officer and the mock suspect in the interview activity and to the interaction in the training activity, i.e. between the participants attending the training course. Drawing on functional pragmatics and grammar, the analysis seeks to examine how reconstructions on the one hand function in the socially non-cooperative interaction in the mock interview, questioning the truth value of propositions and trustworthiness of the suspect, and, on the other hand seem to fulfil a supportive purpose in the training activity.