Selon l'étude européenne translinguistique Neurodys (Becker et al., 2013), la prévalence de la dyslexie touche entre 5 et 10% des enfants âgés de 8 à 12 ans. L’apprentissage du langage écrit revient à maîtriser conjointement ses deux versants : lecture et écriture. La présente étude vise l’analyse des processus d'écriture utilisés par des scripteurs dyslexiques (DL) et dysorthographiques (DO). Afin de favoriser les collaborations chercheurs-praticiens, comme le proposent Hayes et Berninger (2014), nous étudions les données chronométriques relatives à un corpus (...) de textes recueillis auprès de 7 adolescents dyslexiques et dysorthographiques, recrutés dans le cadre de situations de soin courant orthophonique, afin de décrire les opérations de traitement cognitif du langage écrit en contexte d’activité rédactionnelle. Les corpus de productions écrites d’adolescents DL/DO suivis en orthophonie apportent par le biais du relevé chronométrique (vitesses d’écriture, durées des pauses en fonction de leur localisation dans le texte, longueur des passages d’écriture sans pause longue) des éléments sur l’activité de rédaction et les modalités de révision du texte. Ce travail ouvre des perspectives quant au recueil de données en contexte professionnel, de manière à interroger les données cliniques par des outils de recherche développés en linguistique de corpus. (shrink)

Cet article rend compte d’une expérience pédagogique consistant à proposer à des étudiants de 2e année en orthophonie de constituer leur propre corpus de productions orales ou multimodales (enregistrement audio ou vidéo et transcription de cet enregistrement). Il met en évidence un certain nombre de questionnements auxquels cet exercice conduit les étudiants et souligne les liens avec leur pratique future.

Fabriquer de nouvelles formes en discours pour que l’interprétant fabrique un sens plus riche au décodage : tel est l’enjeu continu de la tension entre contrainte systémique et sens visé, conditionnant ainsi le formatage et la présentation des discours. C’est cette tension qui constitue l’objet des études fondées sur des corpus allemands et français, qui sont rassemblées dans ce volume. La production du sens fait feu de tout bois et n’hésite donc pas à susciter l’invention, la distorsion formelle à (...) son service, à tous les niveaux de l’analyse linguistique : présentation des discours, formatage du discours de la critique littéraire, répétition des formes en discours, linéarisation de la phrase allemande, mots-composés en allemand et formes des temps verbaux surcomposés. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Advocacy, Therapy, and PedagogyJohn E. MacKinnonBeyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University, edited by Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir; 272 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.Anyone who would doubt the relevance of philosophy to public affairs ought to attend to the unhappy evolution of the Canadian university. On campuses across the country in recent years, speech codes have been introduced, the “re-education” of (...) professors urged, visiting speakers on controversial subjects silenced, and classes monitored by administrators eager to do the bidding of various special interest groups. As universities have come more and more to see their role as that of some sort of multipurpose social project, education itself has become less pressing a priority. Thus, while money is found to hire sexual harassment officers, employment equity advisors and “wellness” mavens, academic posts disappear. Those that remain are frequently filled in accordance with crass gender and race-based quotas, and when that fails to guarantee positions for members of bureaucratically favored groups, contrived “schools” and pseudodisciplines proliferate. Many of these developments, however, are simply the manifestation of trickle-down deconstruction, trickle-down Rortyism, trickle-down “politics of difference,” of the sort that Charles Taylor is prone to rhapsodize. Notions of value, nature and merit, of equality, universality and objectivity are dismissed as mere inventions, “imperial” notions designed to favor the powerful and oppress the disenfranchised. The art [End Page 492] of spoken and written argument, with their ideals of detachment and discipline, are taken as evidence of a smug “androcentrism,” while rationality itself is derided as a “regime” that works “to maintain patriarchal control of knowledge and knowledge production.” Even the notion of evaluating students by means of essays and exams is ridiculed as scandalously “non-feminist.” While past attacks on academic independence have tended to come from outside the university, Canadian academics over the past decade have slavishly accepted their own domestication. More disconcerting still has been the role of pliant university presidents, most of whom have proved eager to unburden themselves of the inconvenience of scholarship and to indulge the cosmological musings of the radical left.Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University bristles both with resentment that such criticisms should even be aired and paranoia about their motivation. According to its contributors, the challenge to political correctness—the very use of the term as an epithet—is the result of a “neo-conservative” attack that has been orchestrated in and “imported” wholesale from the United States (to morally smug Canadians, there can be no more dastardly provenance) and insinuated into public debate by a servile media. The first two articles in the collection, by Dorothy Smith and Lorna Weir respectively, pursue this very theme. Each betrays that dreary habit, particularly prevalent among social scientists, of rendering imposingly technical the most bracingly trite. For instance, Smith writes: “The textuality of public text-mediated discourse is essential to its peculiar temporal and spatial properties of ubiquity and constancy of replication across multiple and various actual situations of watching, reading, or hearing” (p. 25). Translation? The more one sees, reads or hears a view expressed, the more one tends to believe it’s true. Her concern here, of course, is to establish that whoever controls the means of public debate controls its terms as well, that those means happen to be controlled by neo-conservative interests bent on retarding social progress, and that growing public disquiet about educational reform simply confirms the success of that neo-conservative strategy. But the failure of Smith’s account goes far beyond the thoroughly rebarbative nature of her expression.According to Smith, the very term, “political correctness,” is shorthand for an “ideological code” that has been expressly designed by “neo-conservatives” to caricature the good works of the visionary left. An ideological code, she says, operates as a “free-floating form of control,” which, once established, is “self-reproducing” (p. 27). Now, [End Page 493] the trouble with this picture is that it can account only for ascendant ideological codes, those that are successfully transmitted and progressively consolidated. And yet, in recent years, the ideological code of the left has to a considerable extent... (shrink)

Eighteenth-century France witnessed the rise of matter itself—in forms ranging from atoms to anatomies—as a privileged object of study. Voluptuous Philosophy redefines what is at stake in the emergence of an enlightened secular materialism by showing how questions of figure—how should a body be represented? What should the effects of this representation be on readers?—are tellingly and consistently located at the very heart of 18th-century debates about the nature of material substance. French materialisms of the Enlightenment are crucially invested not (...) only in the development of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus around the notion of matter but in the production of specific relationships between readers and the "matter" of the texts that they consume. How, the book asks, did the period's fascination with a markedly immaterial and ephemeral event—the reading of works of fiction—come to coincide with what appears to be a gradual materialization of human subjects: men and women who increasingly manage to envision themselves transfigured, as the century wears on, into machines, animals, and even, in the work of the Marquis de Sade, tables and chairs? In what way did the spread of new philosophies of matter depend upon the ability of readers to perceive certain figures of speech as literally and immediately true—to imagine themselves as fully material bodies even as they found themselves most deeply compelled by disembodied literary forms? More broadly, in what sense does the act of reading literature alter and transfigure our perceptions of what is, and can be, real? Voluptuous Philosophy articulates the gradual coming into being of literature as a distinct arena of textual production with the rise of an enlightened reader who remains abstracted from the bodily symptoms that any given piece of writing may induce in him. The very definition of "the literary" as an autonomous field, this book suggests, may, ironically, be dependent upon the simultaneous construction of a material world that remains fully immune to its effects. (shrink)

This article proposes an analysis of the gestural production of people suffering from fluent or non-fluent aphasia in comparison with the gestures performed by speakers not suffering from any language disorder. The interest of such a study is twofold: firstly, it allows a better understanding of what happens to gestures during the numerous speech dysfluencies caused by the speech impairment. Among other things, it sheds light on the links between speech and gestures in multimodal face-to-face interaction. (...) Despite the profusion of work on aphasia, very little is still known about the characteristics of the gestures performed spontaneously by aphasic people. The study presented here is based on video examples from the AphasiaBank corpus to illustrate the specific features of the speech and gestures of atypical speakers and gives a more detailed description of the gestural production of people with aphasia. This knowledge can inform post-stroke rehabilitation procedures that rely on some form of multimodal speech therapy in order to adapt to the various communication needs of the patients. (shrink)

La contribution se propose de mettre en évidence les problèmes épistémologiques et méthodologiques posés par l’annotation discursive de productions écrites d’élèves et les choix techniques qu’implique sa mise en œuvre. Dans un premier temps, l’article montre l’intérêt scientifique de la constitution de « grands » corpus scolaires rassemblant plusieurs centaines de textes d’élèves d’école primaire et de collège de niveaux scolaires différents répondant à une même consigne. L’unicité de la consigne permet de comparer les productions en vue d’élaborer une cartographie (...) des moyens linguistiques choisis par les élèves et de mettre en évidence des indicateurs de progressivité. Dans un second temps, sont présentés les enseignements tirés de l’expérience d’annotation discursive qui a abouti à la création de la ressource ANNODIS, corpus de textes en français écrit standard annoté discursivement. Elle s’interroge sur les adaptations nécessaires pour traiter des textes d’élèves et définit des principes de travail généraux notamment sur le choix de la version de texte à annoter, la définition du modèle d’annotation et les guides d’annotation. Sont ensuite exposés deux chantiers d’annotation portant sur des textes d’élèves de fin d’école primaire en réponse à une consigne mettant en jeu la cohésion textuelle, qui demande d’insérer dans un texte narratif trois phrases comportant des pronoms et des syntagmes nominaux anaphoriques. Les notions sont illustrées par l’analyse de deux textes d’élèves de 5° Primaire. L’annotation des Relations de Discours procède successivement, dans une démarche proche de celle d’Annodis, par segmentation du texte en Unités de Discours Élémentaires, analyse de la cohérence temporelle et annotation des Relations de discours. L’annotation des chaînes de référence dans les textes d’élèves suppose des adaptations plus importantes du guide d’annotation antérieurement élaboré. Les premiers essais permettent ainsi de définir des principes de travail pour l’annotation des textes d’élèves. (shrink)

Ce texte répond à trois objectifs : 1) dégager quelques éléments théoriques et méthodologiques essentiels au travail en Analyse du Discours, dans une perspective qui situe le discours comme objet dans un rapport déterminé entre langue et idéologie; 2) exposer la mise en oeuvre de ces éléments à travers la démarche suivie dans un travail d'Analyse du Discours ayant eu pour objet un corpus de discours du Parti communiste français adressés aux Chrétiens ; 3) indiquer le type de résultats auxquels (...) de telles orientations peuvent conduire : une redéfinition des notions de corpus, d'énoncé et d'énonciation dans l'analyse linguistique des processus discursifs.This paper aims at three goals: 1) to draw some essential theoretical and methodological elements from the works in the field of Discourse Analysis, in a perspective that situates discourse as a certain relation between language and ideology; 2) to expose the use of those elements through the approach followed in a Discourse Analysis research which took a corpus of speeches of the French Communist Party addressed to the Christian Community as its object; 3) to indicate the type of results to which such orientations may lead: a redefinition of the notions of corpus, enounced and enounciation in the analysis of discourse processes. (shrink)

La base de données orales de français de Suisse romande (OFROM) contient des transcriptions d’enregistrements auxquels ont participé des locuteurs nés et vivant en Suisse. Elle a été créée par des linguistes soucieux de documenter les usages oraux du français en Suisse romande, et de combler ainsi le retard dans la description des usages oraux de la langue parlée dans cette partie de la francophonie, notamment sur le plan du lexique, de la syntaxe et de la phonologie. La base de (...) données OFROM a été mise en ligne en décembre 2012 ; elle est encore jeune et d’ampleur modeste (65 heures de parole pour près de 410 000 mots transcrits, au moment où nous écrivons), mais il est prévu de l’enrichir et de la diversifier régulièrement au cours des années à venir. La première partie de cet article présente les principes fondamentaux qui ont guidé la constitution de la base (choix des locuteurs, des supports et conventions de transcription, annotations, etc.). La seconde partie contient les résultats obtenus à l’issue d’études en cours ou de sondages prospectifs, portant sur la variation lexicale et la variation syntaxique. Ils permettront d’illustrer quelques-unes des potentialités qu’offrent la base et son moteur de recherche. (shrink)

À la fin de l’époque médiévale, la production et l’importation d’une nouvelle vaisselle, d’une nouvelle mode vestimentaire et d’un nouveau mobilier s’accélèrent dans les villes d’Angleterre. L’acquisition, l’usage et l’entretien d’une gamme de plus en plus large de produits manufacturés n’a pas seulement rendu plus aisée la vie des marchands et des artisans, mais les a transformés eux-mêmes. Cependant l’usage et le sens des objets – les spécialistes de la culture matérielle l’ont bien montré – n’est pas stable. Selon (...) certains archéologues, la vaisselle qui commence à se répandre change peu à peu les habitudes de table avec des conséquences sur l’ordre de genre au sein du foyer. Cet article examine deux textes littéraires du Moyen Âge tardif qui décrivent des banquets exclusivement réservés aux femmes, pour évaluer l’effet de ces changements dans la culture matérielle sur les relations entre maris et femmes. (shrink)

Der Text skizziert eine kurze Theorie der Macht, die den Begriff aus der klassischen Engführung mit Herrschaft, Zwang und Gewalt entbindet und dessen Produktivität für Gesetzgebung und Rechtsprechung freilegt. Ausgehend von den Institutionen des Gaius, einem Lehrbuch aus dem 2. Jh., das im 6. Jh. als Vorlage für die Rechtskodifikation des Kaisers Justinian (corpus iuris civilis) diente, wird gezeigt, wie römische Institutionen die Rechtsförmigkeit unserer Rede von Personen, Dingen und Handlungen instituiert haben. The paper outlines a brief theory of (...) Power that frees the notion from its accustomed association with sovereignty, coercion and violence and uncovers its productivity for legislation and jurisdiction. Starting from Gaius', a legal textbook from the 2 century that served as a model for Emperor Justinian's codification of law (, 6th century), the paper shows how Roman institutions established the legal structure of speech referring to persons, objects and actions. (shrink)

Words in Semitic texts often consist of a concatenation of word segments, each corresponding to a Part-of-Speech (POS) category. Semitic words may be ambiguous with regard to their segmentation as well as to the POS tags assigned to each segment. When designing POS taggers for Semitic languages, a major architectural decision concerns the choice of the atomic input tokens (terminal symbols). If the tokenization is at the word level the output tags must be complex, and represent both the segmentation (...) of the word and the POS tag assigned to each word segment. If the tokenization is at the segment level, the input itself must encode the different alternative segmentations of the words, while the output consists of standard POS tags. Comparing these two alternatives is not trivial, as the choice between them may have global effects on the grammatical model. Moreover, intermediate levels of tokenization between these two extremes are conceivable, and, as we will aim to show, beneficial. To the best of our knowledge, the problem of tokenization for POS tagging of Semitic languages has not been addressed before in full generality. In this paper, we study this problem for the purpose of POS tagging of Modern Hebrew texts. After extensive error analysis of the two simple tokenization models, we propose a novel, linguistically-motivated, intermediate tokenization model that gives better performance for Hebrew over the two initial architectures. Our study is based on the well-known Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We start out from a manually devised morphological analyzer and a very small annotated corpus, and describe how to adapt an HMM-based POS tagger for both tokenization architectures. We present an effective technique for smoothing the lexical probabilities using an untagged corpus, and a novel transform for casting the segment-level tagger in terms of a standard, word-level, HMM implementation. The results obtained using our model are on par with the best published results on Modern Standard Arabic, despite the much smaller annotated corpus available for Modern Hebrew.. (shrink)

This corpus analysis of linguistic and semantic features in French parliamentary debates concerning online hate speech regulation, highlights tensions between state powers and private rights. Two key themes are identified: first, the _problem of definition_: how such online content is defined in the debates, and second, the _problem of regulation_: how the debates negotiate the supra-jurisdictional and individual jurisdiction issues involved, in regulating both the global online content and the responsibilities of the owners of the platforms who manage the (...) content. For this analysis, the authors created a corpus of French National Assembly Examination Committee discussions and public sessions between July 2019 to January 2020 discussing the _Loi Avia _(Avia Law). The corpus was analysed using quali-quantitative methods. Overall, the study combines a top-down (global) and a bottom-up (local) analysis of the data, applying corpus semantic approaches (Lecolle et al. in Langages 210(2):35–54, 2018; Rastier in The Routledge handbook of semantics, Routledge, pp 507–522, 2015) to contextualize the analysis of the meta-discourse (Hyland in Meta-discourse: exploring interaction in writing, 1st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350063617 ). The analysis highlights the linguistic features revealing the power dynamics inherent within the discourse and counter-discourse of the dominant and opposition political parties respectively. (shrink)

Le corpus PhraséoRoChe se centre sur le roman de chevalerie de langue française écrit en prose. Il rassemble des textes issus d’œuvres produites entre le XIIIe siècle et le XVIIe siècle, période bornée par la naissance et la disparition de ce genre textuel. Pour permettre des interrogations par le lecteur d’aujourd’hui d’un corpus outillé embrassant une diachronie aussi longue, il faut faire des choix concernant l’évolution de la langue, non seulement en traitant le décalage entre le français contemporain et la (...) langue des textes retenus mais aussi en faisant face aux difficultés liées à l’hétérogénéité de l’ancien français, du moyen français et du français préclassique. Quels choix méthodologiques peuvent être pertinents en vue de l’objectif défini, à savoir une exploitation de type linguistique, stylistique ou littéraire? Les collaborateurs du projet se sont heurtés à la triple difficulté de rester fidèles aux textes, d’intégrer la diversité des pratiques éditoriales des chercheurs selon les étapes de l’histoire du français et d’unifier le plus possible les principes de traitement pour faciliter la réception actuelle. Le présent article rend compte des deux volets de l’opération : la sélection et la transcription d’un ensemble de 40 textes, d’abord, et l’annotation au moyen de balises structurelles, d’étiquettes lexicales et d’étiquettes morphosyntaxiques, ensuite. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of (...) poisoning public political discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

Individuals typically produce auditory sequences, such as speech or music, at a consistent spontaneous rate or tempo. We addressed whether spontaneous rates would show patterns of convergence across the domains of music and language production when the same participants spoke sentences and performed melodic phrases on a piano. Although timing plays a critical role in both domains, different communicative and motor constraints apply in each case and so it is not clear whether music and speech would display (...) similar timing mechanisms. We report the results of two experiments in which adult participants produced sequences from memory at a comfortable spontaneous (uncued) rate. In Experiment 1, monolingual pianists in Buffalo, New York engaged in three production tasks: speaking sentences from memory, performing short melodies from memory, and tapping isochronously. In Experiment 2, English-French bilingual pianists in Montréal, Canada produced melodies on a piano as in Experiment 1, and spoke short rhythmically-structured phrases repeatedly. Both experiments led to the same pattern of results. Participants exhibited consistent spontaneous rates within each task. People who produced one spoken phrase rapidly were likely to produce another spoken phrase rapidly. This consistency across stimuli was also found for performance of different musical melodies. In general, spontaneous rates across speech and music tasks were not correlated, whereas rates of tapping and music were correlated. Speech rates (for syllables) were faster than music rates (for tones) and speech showed a smaller range of spontaneous rates across individuals than did music or tapping rates. Taken together, these results suggest that spontaneous rate reflects cumulative influences of endogenous rhythms (in consistent self-generated rates within domain), peripheral motor constraints (in finger movements across tapping and music), and communicative goals based on the cultural transmission of auditory information (slower rates for to-be-synchronized music than for speech). (shrink)

It is well known that the unpredictable speech production brought on by stress from the task at hand has a significant negative impact on the performance of speech processing algorithms. Speech therapy benefits from being able to detect stress in speech. Speech processing performance suffers noticeably when perceptually produced stress causes variations in speech production. Using the acoustic speech signal to objectively characterize speaker stress is one method for assessing production (...) variances brought on by stress. Real-world complexity and ambiguity make it difficult for decision-makers to express their conclusions with clarity in their speech. In particular, the Neutrosophic speech algorithm is used to encode the language variables because they cannot be computed directly. Neutrosophic sets are used to manage indeterminacy in a practical situation. Existing algorithms are used except for stress on Neutrosophic speech recognition. The creation of algorithms that calculate, categorize, or differentiate between different stress circumstances. Understanding stress and developing strategies to combat its effects on speech recognition and human-computer interaction system are the goals of this recognition. (shrink)

Electronic text can be defined on two different, though interconnected, levels. On the one hand, electronic text can be defined by taking the notion of “text” or “printed text” as the point of departure. On the other hand, electronic text can be defined by taking the digital format as the point of departure, where everything is represented in the binary alphabet. While the notion of text in most cases lends itself to being independent of (...) medium and embodiment, it is also often tacitly assumed that it is in fact modeled on the print medium, instead of, for instance, on hand-written text or speech. In late 20th century, the notion of “text” was subjected to increasing criticism, as can be seen in the question that has been raised in literary text theory about whether “there is a text in this class.” At the same time, the notion was expanded by including extralinguistic sign modalities (images, videos). A basic question, therefore, is whether electronic text should be included in the enlarged notion that text is a new digital sign modality added to the repertoire of modalities or whether it should be included as a sign modality that is both an independent modality and a container that can hold other modalities. In the first case, the notion of electronic text would be paradigmatically formed around the e-book, which was conceived as a digital copy of a printed book but is now a deliberately closed work. Even closed works in digital form will need some sort of interface and hypertextual navigation that together constitute a particular kind of paratext needed for accessing any sort of digital material. In the second case, the electronic text is defined by the representation of content and (some parts of the) processing rules as binary sequences manifested in the binary alphabet. This wider notion would include, for instance, all sorts of scanning results, whether of the outer cosmos or the interior of our bodies and of digital traces of other processes in-between (machine readings included). Since other alphabets, such as the genetic alphabet and all sorts of images may also be represented in the binary alphabet, such materials will also belong to the textual universe within this definition. A more intriguing implication is that born-digital materials may also include scripts and interactive features as intrinsic parts of the text. The two notions define the text on different levels: one is centered on the Latin, the other on the binary alphabet, and both definitions include hypertext, interactivity, and multimodality as constituent parameters. In the first case, hypertext is included as a navigational, paratextual device; whereas in the second case, hypertext is also incorporated in the narrative within an otherwise closed work or as a constituent element on the textual universe of the web, where it serves the ongoing production of (possibly scripted) connections and disconnections between blocks of textual content. Since the early decades of early 21st century still represent only the very early stages of the globally distributed universe of web texts, this is also a history of the gradual unfolding of the dimensions of these three constituencies—hypertext, interactivity, and multimodality. The result is a still-expanding repertoire of genres, including some that are emerging via path dependency; some via remediation; and some as new genres that are unique for networked digital media, including “social media texts” and a growing variety of narrative and discursive multiple-source systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Violence Is Not an Evil”Ambiguity and Violence in Simone de Beauvoir’s Early Philosophical WritingsAnn V. MurphyThe recent translation and compilation of several of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical essays from the 1940s shed new light on Beauvoir’s understanding of the relationship between ethics and violence. While these essays predate the publication of The Second Sex (1949) and do not concern themselves with the subject of feminism per se, Beauvoir’s philosophy (...) of violence as it is outlined in both “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (1944) and “An Eye for an Eye” (1948) speaks to one of the more thoroughgoing concerns in contemporary feminist philosophy; namely, the nature of the relation between corporeal vulnerability, violence, and ethics. Together with The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), these early essays probe the difficulties in moving from an ontology in which violence appears to be inexorable to the terrain of ethical prescription. This essay urges recognition of the continuing relevance of Beauvoir’s philosophy in relation to the renaissance of interest in the theme of vulnerability in contemporary feminist theory. I argue that Beauvoir’s philosophy provides one of the most sophisticated accounts to date of the ethical problems posed by the experiential ambiguities of violence, and that her legacy in this regard is as important and redemptive as ever. More precisely, I read Beauvoir’s early conception of ambiguity as the philosophical predecessor to contemporary deconstructive accounts of corporeal vulnerability.Discourse on the body has governed the evolution of feminist philosophy. Recently, however, the nature of the body under investigation has changed. Whereas previously the critique of the nature/culture distinction dominated [End Page 29] feminist debates regarding the social construction of sex and gender, recent feminist work has consolidated around another conceptual pairing; namely, vulnerability and aggression. In reference to Beauvoir’s philosophical corpus, this recent development is interesting. Her magnum opus, The Second Sex, has attracted more attention because of its centrality in the debates over the social construction of sex and gender, a debate that has dominated feminist philosophy for the last several decades. Indeed, many laud this text for being ahead of its time with regard to the acknowledgement that “one is not born a woman,” but rather becomes one. This essay argues that Beauvoir’s early texts are similarly prescient with regard to the current preoccupation with the philosophical themes of violence and vulnerability. By tracing the development of Beauvoir’s idea of ambiguity, I argue that her conception of the body as the site of both aggression and vulnerability both anticipates and continues to productively address the problem of how one moves from a descriptive ontology to the terrain of ethics. This is a movement that Beauvoir arguably theorized more rigorously than either Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Jean-Paul Sartre, neither of whom published such sustained philosophical work on ethics in his lifetime.1I. Ambiguity in Beauvoir’s Early WorkIn The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir’s reflections on ethics come from a resolutely secular, existentialist perspective. Beauvoir—like her contemporaries in French existential phenomenology—understood human existence to be essentially marked by failure. Importantly, this failure is not vicious; rather, it is the consequence of the fact that human freedom can only ever be determined in scenes of constraint. Despite her resistance to the universal aspirations of Kant’s ethics, Beauvoir’s understanding of subjectivity as failure is consonant with the Kantian rendering of the ethical agent as a being for whom reason does not infallibly determine the will; indeed, an agent for whom reason is necessarily undone by certain inclinations and contingencies.2 For Kant, it made no sense to speak of the will unless one was referring to a being that had the capacity to act in accord with reason but did not infallibly manage to do so. Hence, ethics is an issue for us precisely to the degree that we are capable of failure. In this sense, ambiguity and failure mark the human condition and our distance from the divine. Only a being whose existence is marked by this inadequacy would ponder right and wrong, would debate the nature of ethical atrocity and recovery, and would anguish over the... (shrink)

Le corpus de littéracie avancée réunit des écrits universitaires et professionnels produits par des étudiants du niveau Licence 1 au Master 2. Il contient actuellement 338 textes (+ d’1 million de mots) et est mis à disposition au format xml, assorti de métadonnées (niveau, discipline, genre, consigne d’écriture etc.). Il est à la fois un aboutissement et un point de départ dans le champ de la littéracie avancée : parce que l’enjeu n’est pas tant de constituer des corpus que de (...) les savoir utilisés et de nourrir les recherches actuelles et futures, il est pensé comme un construit évolutif. L’article expose d’abord les objectifs du corpus : le premier, d’ordre descriptif est de cerner les compétences rédactionnelles et les besoins de formation à un niveau avancé ; le second, d’ordre didactique, est qu’il sert de ressource pour la formation, notamment pour des activités d’observation et de manipulation par les apprenants. Sont ensuite présentées les métadonnées, conçues en phase avec les recommandations de la TEI et dans la perspective d’un outillage des linguistes et des didacticiens dans le champ de la littéracie avancée. Enfin, l’article met en évidence les potentialités du corpus : intégrer des données sur les processus d’écriture et des textes annotés par des relecteurs-correcteurs, élaborer des dispositifs didactiques à l’échelle textuelle. à terme, le corpus gagnera à être associé à des outils de requête et à s’enrichir d’annotations diverses, selon les besoins des chercheurs et des formateurs. (shrink)

This article is aimed at introducing a French discourse analysis model, e.g. the ‘star model’, initiated by the LAA team led by Robert Vion in Aix-en-Provence, to English-speaking researchers. It will be argued that language activity is multi-dimensional and can be traced at various heterogeneous levels of speech productions belonging to macro as well as micro orders. Speakers achieve different varieties of positioning which result in negotiating an interactional space within a pre-given situation. The model is precisely designed to (...) offer a unified and comprehensive view of such heterogeneous phenomena in constant interconnection. In this study, we also intend to illustrate our approach through the analysis of two different corpora. Speakers’ strategies under extreme conditions will be analysed; the various sequences used were taken from a special corpus which we were asked to study as part of a national research programme. In order to illustrate interactional space shifts, we will also use the transcript of a meeting which took place between a patient and a medical investigator in a hospital in Marseilles. (shrink)

How many words is a bilingual 2-year-old supposed to know or say in each of her languages? Speech and language therapists or researchers lack the tools to answer this question, because several factors have an impact on bilingual language skills: gender, amount of exposure, mode of acquisition, socio-economic status and the distance between L1 and L2. Unfortunately, these factors are usually studied separately, making it difficult to evaluate their weight on a unique measure of vocabulary. The present study measures (...) the contribution of the following factors to the vocabulary scores of bilingual toddlers: i) gender; ii) sibling ranking; iii) relative amount of exposure to each language; iv) mode of exposure; v) SES; vi) linguistic distance; vii) language spoken between parents. Close to the child’s second birthday, parents of 278 UK-based bilinguals completed successively: a 100-word version of the Oxford-CDI, the CDI in the child’s Additional Language, a family questionnaire, and the Language Exposure Questionnaire. Thirty-six British-English-AL pairs were considered, with languages contrasted on a second-language-learning scale : for example, Dutch and French are close to British-English, while Polish or Cantonese are more distant. Data from the corpus were included in two mixed-effect models, one with the English scores in comprehension as the dependent variable, and the other with production scores. The seven factors listed above were included as predictors. The amount of English exposure was the strongest predictor of comprehension scores = 9.35, p <.005, β = 0.02, t = 3.08, p <.005), followed by the language that parents speak between themselves = 14.94, p <.001, β = 1.37, t = 3.76, p <.0005), linguistic distance = 6.92, p <.01, β = -0.74, t = -2.66, p <.01) and age = 4.86, p <.05, β = 0.55, t = 2.17, p <.05). In production, gender = 13.57, p <.0005, β = -0.91, t = -03.72, p <.0005), amount of exposure to English = 13.57, p <.0005, β = -0.91, t = -03.72, p <.0005), the language that parents speak between themselves = 11.85, p <.005, β = 1.09, t = 3.41, p <.001), and the mother’s occupation = 4.51, p <.05, β = 0.63, t = 2.13, p <.05) were the significant predictors. The more English parents use to address one another, the more English words the child says and understands. This surprising result could be simply explained by the fact that parents who speak English together are also more likely to speak English to their child. The main results of this study is that linguistic distance is a powerful predictor of toddlers’ vocabulary in English, with children learning two close languages growing their vocabulary faster than those learning distant languages. (shrink)

The referred speech is usually presented by declarative verbs. However, there are other semantic classes specialized in speech reproduction procedures, such as request verbs. From the analysis of the Archivo de Textos Hispánicos de la Universidad de Santiago, made up of texts of oral, theatrical, journalistic and narrative language, we try to establish the frequency of use of the verbs implorar, suplicar, rogar, solicitar, pedir, reclamar and exigir as introducers of referred speech, as well as their greater (...) or lesser productivity according to the type of procedure: indirect style, direct style, pseudo-direct style and hybrid style. In addition, the characteristics of each structure are explored with the proposal of knowing the configuration mode of the sequences that introduces each verb (its members, the position of each element, etc.) and that establish certain differences between them within each type of referred speech. (shrink)

RESUMO O presente estudo propõe-se a responder às seguintes questões: 1ª) Que noções de enunciação podem ser derivadas da reflexão discursiva de Michel Pêcheux nos anos iniciais de sua produção? 2ª) Qual é o estatuto que assume a enunciação no escopo da AD nesse período? Para tanto, procede a um exame de textos do filósofo francês publicados entre 1969 e 1975, a fim de investigar a problematização da enunciação nesses escritos. A análise do corpus teórico permite dele derivar diversas noções (...) de enunciação, as quais revelam em seu conjunto um estatuto epistemológico e um estatuto teórico-metodológico da enunciação no estabelecimento das bases fundantes da AD. ABSTRACT The current study aims to answer the following questions: 1) What notions of enunciation can be derived from Michel Pêcheux’s discursive reflection in the early years of his production? 2) What is the status assumed by enunciation in the scope of DA in this period? For this purpose, an examination into the French philosopher’s texts published from 1969 to 1975 is made in order to investigate the problem of enunciation in these writings. The analysis of the theoretical corpus allows the examination of several notions of enunciation, which as a whole reveal an epistemological status and a theoretical-methodological status of enunciation in the establishment of the Pecheutian DA founding bases. (shrink)

Dans un premier temps, cette contribution fournit une présentation rapide des corpus médiévaux, principalement pour l’anglais et le français, en relation avec des projets d’annotation centrés sur l’annotation syntaxique. La seconde partie traite des aspects spécifiques de l’annotation syntaxique pour les textes d’ancien français et s’intéresse particulièrement aux interactions entre la préannotation automatique et les outils d’annotation manuelle.

Research on legal discourse has developed according to a variety of perspectives. As for descriptive accounts, two approaches are noteworthy. Firstly, Anglophone scholars have dealt with legal language from a genre-based viewpoint. Secondly, French studies have focused on argumentation in judicial texts, by considering the forms of reasoning involved in it and, albeit more rarely, its linguistic constituents. This paper aims at reinforcing the linguistic component of the analysis of legal discourse, by carrying out a corpus-based genre analysis on a (...) sample of 40 judgments. First of all, the results of the investigation of the genre structure of judgments will be presented. The comparative approach adopted will show that the differences between European and English/Irish judgments mainly concern the generic move Arguing the case. Secondly, analysis will concentrate in more detail on one of the most frequent tools used in the discursive construction of argumentation within the aforementioned move, i.e. the widely spread reporting verb HOLD. A study of its concordances suggests that it is used in all types of judgments as a meta-argumentative operator signalling either an authoritative stance taken by the Court or an equally authoritative reported argumentation of another judge or court. (shrink)

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child‐directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We evaluate two sets of features: One set is generated from the distribution of words into frames defined by the two adjacent words. These features primarily encode syntactic aspects of word usage. (...) The other set is generated from non‐adjacent co‐occurrences between words. These features encode complementary thematic aspects of word usage. Regression models using these distributional features to predict age of acquisition of 656 early‐acquired English words indicate that both types of features improve predictions over simpler models based on frequency and appearance in salient or simple utterance contexts. Syntactic features were stronger predictors of children's production than comprehension, whereas thematic features were stronger predictors of comprehension. Overall, earlier acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for nouns and verbs, and by thematic content related to food and face‐to‐face play topics; later acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for pronouns and question words, and by content related to narratives and object play. (shrink)

Long before Siri and ChatGPT uttered their first automated words, there was only one way to program synthetic speech: with paint and brush. During the transformative years between 1930 and 1960, artists, linguists, and engineers mixed sound and image in a way that combined artistic production with new technologies. What was known as “synthesis-by-art” grew into the rules that power computer speech today. This article concentrates on the emergence of rule-based speech synthesis at Haskins Laboratories in (...) mid-twentieth-century America. An unexpected outgrowth of their work with disabled Second World War veterans, members of the Haskins group had developed a new machine that converted visual patterns into sound: the Pattern Playback. Like holes in a player-piano roll, painted shapes were mechanically translated into distinct sounds. Early experiments at the laboratory promised “a new art form.” Researchers painted pictures of music and listened to geometric shapes. This work eventually grew into a psycholinguistic program committed to painting the shapes of speech. But these early aesthetic experiments had helped researchers cultivate a familiarity with paint, brush, and subjective bodily knowledge. This allowed them to intuitively develop a recipe for painting synthetic speech. In other words, their painting hands enacted knowledge long before they could articulate the complex rules that govern how phonemes interact. By the late 1950s, lab member Frances Ingemann successfully converted this “embodied knowing” into a machine-legible code that rigorously detailed how to paint synthetic speech. She had hoped that her rules might result in a reading machine for blind users that would automatically convert text into speech. Instead, her work was coopted by J. C. R. Licklider, who described Ingemann’s rulebook as “a digital code, suitable for use by computing machines.” While Licklider would use the work of Haskins Laboratories to spearhead his novel concept of man-computer symbiosis, he obscured the extent to which this digital code grew from the anomalous bodies of wounded war veterans and the subjective knowing of painting hands. Indeed, the forgotten history of early text-to-speech shows the indivisibility of interactive computing and digital codes from the material practices and embodied cognition from which they grew. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary composition by (...) clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)

Des revues et des ouvrages spécialisés ont préconisé l’exploitation des textes littéraires dans l’apprentissage du français langue étrangère. Mais les recherches et les pratiques pédagogiques axées sur les apports de la littérature dans l’enseignement de la prononciation sont rares. En didactique des langues, les enseignants ont tendance à négliger, très souvent, l’acquisition des compétences orales, face à la concurrence de la langue écrite, de la grammaire ou du vocabulaire. Dans cet article, nous présentons les expériences sur le développement de la (...) production orale et la correction de la prononciation en relation avec la littérature dans le dispositif de formation Campus Virtuel FLE à l’Université de León. À l’heure du numérique nous aurons recours aux multiples ressources, outils, environnements informatiques et médias sociaux en relation avec les domaines suivants : 1. Le projet Littérature Française Multimédia FLE, une base de données audiovisuelle en ligne sur la littérature française pour l’enseignement et apprentissage du FLE ; 2. Les tâches sur la littérature pour l’acquisition des compétences orales ; 3. Le corpus Oral FLE Prononciation des productions orales des apprenants hispanophones ; 4. Les techniques et méthodes de correction de la prononciation à l’aide des médias sociaux. (shrink)

The linguistic complexity of words has largely been studied on the behavioral level and in experimental settings. Only little is known about the neural processes underlying it in uninstructed, spontaneous conversations. We built up a multimodal neurolinguistic corpus composed of synchronized audio, video, and electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings from the fronto-temporo-parietal cortex to address this phenomenon based on uninstructed, spontaneous speech production. We performed extensive linguistic annotations of the language material and calculated word complexity using several numeric parameters. We (...) orthogonalized the parameters with the help of a linear regression model. Then, we correlated the spectral components of neural activity with the individual linguistic parameters and with the residuals of the linear regression model, and compared the results. The proportional relation between the number of consonants and vowels, which was the most informative parameter with regard to the neural representation of word complexity, showed effects in two areas: the frontal one was at the junction of the premotor cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and Brodmann area 44. The postcentral one lay directly above the lateral sulcus and comprised the ventral central sulcus, the parietal operculum and the adjacent inferior parietal cortex. Beyond the physiological findings summarized here, our methods may be useful for those interested in ways of studying neural effects related to natural language production and in surmounting the intrinsic problem of collinearity between multiple features of spontaneously spoken material. (shrink)

Writing, the exigency of writing: no longer the writing that has always (through a necessity in no way avoidable) been in the service of the speech or thought that is called idealist (that is to say, moralizing), but rather the writing that through its own slowly liberated force (the aleatory force of absence) seems to devote itself solely to itself as something that remains without identity, and little by little brings forth possibilities that are entirely other: an anonymous, distracted, (...) deferred, and dispersed way of being in relation, by which everything is brought into question – and first of all the idea of God, of the Self, of the Subject, then of Truth and the One, then finally the idea of the Book and the Work so that this writing (understood in its enigmatic rigor), far from having the Book as its goal rather signals its end: a writing that could be said to be outside discourse, outside language. – Maurice Blanchot ( The Infinite Conversation , xi) The Compendium * Beginning with the idea and practice of writing, and moving to the subject or self, then to truth and the One, and arriving at the Book and the Work, Blanchot’s words reflect the trajectory of the following work of writing. True to the embeddedness of the subject in the work of writing, the term “Compendium” has been a metonym for me over the past few years as I have thought about the concept of totality alongside its expression in figures such as the One, the Whole, or the All. In the following I aim to share some of the content of this metonym, and to enrich it by making some distinctions. 1 Here the term “Compendium” will refer to a concept of totality that is ontological (pertaining to being, and the copula) and also textual (pertaining to the symbolic, and the signifier-signified relationship). The Compendium is a figure for thinking the world as a Book, in the broadest sense—an approach to reality that is by no means new, but one that is due for renewal. 2 In partial answer to the question of the Compendium we will say that the word ‘Compendium’ stands in for expressions which seek to totalize, or concepts which seek to approach the concept of ‘everything,’ particularly when these expressions are bound up in the question of the Book (both the book as a physical object and the Book as a metaphysical figure: a way of thinking about the work in and of writing). The question of the Compendium is strongly associated with the physical and metaphysical form of the Book, like the mysterious and symbolic books which are opened in the Biblical book of Revelation, the book of life and the book of death, which together constitute an important couplet. 3 Parataxis & Hypotaxis There are two helpful distinctions that will bring us closer to an answer to the question “What is a Compendium?” The first distinction is between two figures in and for writing: parataxis and hypotaxis . Typically paired in contrast to one another as literary techniques, with parataxis indicating a side-by-side placement of textual elements and hypotaxis referring to subordinate arrangements of textual elements, the two figures can be understood as having a philosophical significance in addition to their practical function as devices for writers. For us these two terms will remain between philosophical theory and writing practice, and serve as a perspective for our writing and creation of texts. Here I take texts to refer to anything from the concrete written words in a book, to the ontological text of the world that we experience. Parataxis , as a figural way of thinking about the ontological structure of texts, refers to texts which are tightly woven and interdependent – texts within which each sentence bears the weight of the entire work. Parataxis often involves repetition, great density, and fragility. One of the best examples of this sort of text is Theodor Adorno’s posthumous magnum opus , Aesthetic Theory . In addition to the text itself, the translation history of the book may also help us to better understand parataxis and its relation to hypotaxis . The final published version of Aesthetic Theory , in German, was a text that Adorno intended to revise and rewrite, but this intention was never realized because of his untimely death. Where the German text of Aesthetic Theory certainly exemplifies the concept of parataxis , the first English edition took this densely woven text and carved Adorno’s lengthy paragraphs and lengthy sentences into manageable ‘bite-sized’ pieces of English text. The first translator took further liberty and inserted headings and new paragraph breaks where there were none in the original. Aesthetic Theory was eventually retranslated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and is now available in a form that is much more faithful to the original work. 4 The pertinent idea that this translation history points to is the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis . Where parataxis describes texts which are repetitive, densely woven, and often fragile, hypotaxis describes texts which are hierarchical and in which the primary relation is linear – the latter of which is very similar to the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory . On the other hand, the original German text that Adorno wrote was very dense, often repetitive, and contained long sections of text unbroken by paragraphs or headings. This example of parataxis was then turned towards hypotaxis through the initial translation which took a text that was, in many ways, nonhierarchical and nonlinear, and artificially subjected it to a hierarchy that was not its own (and here I take the word of Fredric Jameson who comments on the two translations in a note at the beginning of his book Late Marxism ). 5 The point here is not about translation, but rather the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis precisely as they are figures for discourse, written or otherwise. The concept of parataxis looks far more postmodern and rhizomic than the concept of hypotaxis which remains very modern and arborescent. This is a more figural way of talking about the distinction. However, if we wanted to take a more precise and analytical approach we could say that on the level of form parataxis involves a relationship between sentences and paragraphs in which each part bears an equally crushing responsibility to present the whole content of the text. As well, on the level of content, parataxis requires that each concept in a work take on the full conceptual weight of the total work. Continuing the analysis, we could say that parataxis describes texts in which there is no (or very little) linear or causal move from antecedent to consequent, whether in content or form. Instead, parataxis describes texts which weave together concepts via conjugations or associations. The concept of hypotaxis , on the other hand, requires that texts submit themselves to hierarchy, one example of which is logical argumentation. The contingency of the conclusion upon premises in hypotaxis is certainly distinct from the repetition, re-presentation, and conjugation of concepts in parataxis , and I think that this is evident in the difference between the writing styles prevalent in contemporary Analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. It is not the case that the distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis absolutely corresponds with the writing styles of Continental and Analytic philosophy (respectively). There are thinkers who take exception to this pattern, such as Badiou’s more formal approach in the discourse of Continental philosophy to give one example. However, when Analytic philosophy takes its writing lessons from the sciences, and seeks to do philosophy via the clean linear move from antecedent to consequent, then I think that Analytic philosophy writes with hypotaxis in mind. On the other hand, when Continental (particularly German and French) philosophy takes its writing lessons from narrative or poetry then Continental philosophy writes with parataxis in mind. It is not fair to say that all those writing Continental philosophy are looking to narrative and poetry for stylistic direction, just as it is not the case that all those writing Analytic philosophy have mathematics and science as their writing format, however there are some striking ways in which the differing epistemologies of Continental and Analytic philosophy encourage writing with parataxis and hypotaxis in mind (respectively). For some, writing with parataxis or hypotaxis in mind is a conscious decision and a product of stylistic self-consciousness, and for others it is an unconscious discursive and epistemic requirement that must be met in order to be involved in a particular discourse. Before moving on to our second distinction, and then an examination of the question of the Book, it is important to point out that both totality and figurations like the One, the Whole, and the All, come out of very human desires to totalize or to actualize our being-towards-totality. The relationship between identity and totality then can be construed, with Heidegger in mind, as striving toward wholeness, completion, or fulfillment, each of which is a quality of compendia. 6 Compilation & Selection The first distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis pertains to both form and content, and to both the mechanics of writing and the ideas to which writing refers. The second distinction pertains to both as well. In the process of writing and in the process of perception as well, there is a tension between compilation and selection . To begin with, in the work of theory-writing there is compilation, and this is because writing theory requires a broad perspective and certain measure of totalization. On the other hand, writing theory requires that the writer select an idea or a combination of ideas to individuate out of a radical and infinite multiplicity of identities and combinations. The concern here is not primarily for the writing of a theory about a specific idea, like a secondary work or a reference text. But rather the concern is with the writing of grand theories: Marx and Marxism, Derrida and Deconstruction, Husserl and Phenomenology, Sartre and Existentialism, Saussure and Structuralism —each of which strives along a trajectory towards being all-encompassing, whether it intends to or not. Today, we could even say that Speculative Realism has embarked on this journey, and perhaps now we could say that the discourse of Speculative Realism has reached the inevitable point after which a grand theory leaves the hands of its writer or writers and becomes a possession of the collective consciousness of the academy, or (perhaps now) the mass consciousness of the blogosphere—and this is a true pharmakon , a poison and a cure, a blessing and a curse. 7 When we write theory, whether the scope is that of a grand theory or a particular theory, we write in the tension between compilation (making good on the desire to be all encompassing) and selection (being required to decide and discern and to judge what is included in the work and what is deleted or appended or abridged or given over to ellipses). Generally speaking, the work of theory-writing often comes out of a desire to totalize, that is, to develop a theory of everything that is able to apprehend new experiences and ideas while still remaining whole. I grant that this is not a universal desire, and that not everyone who sits down to write a work (or book) of theory does so because of their will-to-totality, but it remains that this drive to totalize does condition a great many writers of theory (especially those who seek to develop grand theories like those mentioned previously). At the beginning of his book of interviews, Between Existentialism and Marxism , Sartre is quoted as saying, after completing the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason : “I no longer feel the need to make long digressions in my books, as if I were forever chasing after my own philosophy. It will now be deposited in little coffins, and I will feel completely emptied and at peace—as I felt after Being and Nothingness . A feeling of emptiness: a writer is fortunate if he can attain such a state. For when one has nothing to say, one can say everything .” 8 This is where our two initial distinctions come to bear on the being-towards-totality as it is expressed in the concrete practice of writing: the first being between parataxis and hypotaxis , and the second being between compilation and selection. Where this second distinction is concerned there is a certain paradox at play given that selection is inescapable, and compilation is unachievable. Selection is inescapable (with the figure of the Compendium in mind) because, even when the imperative to compile is followed to excruciating lengths, selection still has the last word. This is why the Compendium is a figure rather than some material thing that can actually be accomplished or actualized. No matter how far one goes along with the will-to-archive and the will-to-compile, it is only ever a question of minimizing selection and never eliminating it. This leads to the second point, which is that total compilation is unachievable. The closest thing to total compilation that we have before us is the ontological and textual fabric of the world. Even in the case of the world, compilation cannot be enacted in a total fashion because of the need to include both the sphere of the actual and the sphere of the possible or potential. This as another way in which compilation is always-already selection, and further evidence that total compilation is practically impossible. Discursive Figuration and Total Writing Rather than figuration referring to a figure of speech or an image, here the term points to a way in which to think about the work of writing, both the work put into writing, and the work that is the result of writing: the finished yet incomplete final piece. As figures or figurations, the Book and the Compendium are ways of thinking about the work of writing and the human desire for the wholeness, completion, and fulfillment that are made manifest in the completed form of the book (whether a published or printed or saved document put to rest by the author). These two figures bear more strongly upon works that seek to be all-encompassing, and works that strive towards expressions of totality such as the One, the Whole, or the All. Moving on to the topic of the subtitle, and on a more prescriptive note, I would say that there is more hope for theory-writing to be found in parataxis than hypotaxis . Part of the reason for this claim is the poststructuralist critique of hierarchies, and yet another part is the compelling line of thinking called “weak thought” (in theology by John D. Caputo, and in philosophy by Gianni Vattimo, among others). 9 The consequences of these two convictions are such that if one is to strongly assert the truth of a grand theory without leaving the realm of hierarchy-critique and weak thought, then one must write paradoxically with parataxis in mind, and in so doing write weakly and non-hierarchically. This does not mean avoiding a sort of topography or topology when writing theory, rather it means avoiding both subjugation and oppression in thought by pursuing a nonviolent sort of ontology. In order to do this, theory writing does not present itself as an exercise in logical analysis where one mechanically moves from a set of premises (via contingency) to the inevitable conclusion (via necessity). Instead, theory approaches the idea of a Compendium. Given that the figural Compendium places parataxis and compilation above hypotaxis and selection, then the question becomes: is placing one part of a binary term before another not just another way of selecting, or another expression of hypotaxis ? Counter to the urge to resign oneself to the reign of selection, with some qualification one can nonetheless write without deciding whether selection and hypotaxis should be subservient to compilation and parataxis (which is to say that writing-without-decision is somewhere between and beyond possibility and impossibility). This dilemma can be disarmed by stating that theory writing is not about primacy, and not about having-decided-beforehand, both stylistically and also where content is concerned. This is the paradox of writing: always striving along a trajectory ( telos ) towards totality via parataxis and compilation, but always being drawn back to finitude and making selections, and placing one idea before another with hypotaxis in mind. In light of this paradox, the question of the Compendium as a figure for discourse and a figural Book has resonance with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Edmund Jabès’ Book of Questions , found in his Writing and Difference . The Question of the Book “Little by little the book will finish me.” 10 Derrida quotes Jabès, and proceeds to outline the reflexive relationship between the author of the book and the book itself, each of which are subjected to the other through a sort of chiasmus, both ontological and textual (not that the two are entirely separable). The Book, for Derrida like Blanchot in the introductory quotation, “infinitely reflects itself” and “develops as a painful questioning of its own possibility”, and in light of this we can draw an association with the painful tension between the practical reality of selection and the ideal trajectory of compilation. 11 This tension in writing, between the will to total compilation and the necessity of abridgment, is an ontological tension between part and whole just as it is a textual tension between signifier and signified. The ontological tension in writing that Derrida expresses in his essay on Jabès is between everything and nothing – a contradiction which Derrida finds in Jabès’ Book of Questions and also in the divine, in God. When one writes between compilation and selection one writes towards totality, and here we can follow Derrida who states that the lapse in signification, presumably in the signifier-signified discrepancy, is a “ rupture with totality itself” and furthermore that this lapse cannot be rectified through deductive reason or even philosophical discourse. 12 This rupture with totality, found in the troubled relation between signifier and signified, can also tell us a lot about the Book and about writing. Given an understanding of writing as an ontological act that strives towards (but never accomplishes) totality, we can see the written book as the manifested and given body of that striving. Perhaps in other disciplines or even other schools of philosophy there is a cultural climate within which the article is prized above the book, but I am fairly confident, especially when referring to the grand theories of Continental thought, that there is a respect for the book as a uniquely meaningful object capable of apprehending totality. Derrida writes, Between the too warm flesh of the literal event and the cold skin of the concept runs meaning. This is how it enters into the book. Everything enters into, transpires in the book. This is why the book is never finite. It always remains suffering and vigilant. 13 Here the vitality of the literal event is compromised by the deadening weight of the concept, and the figure of the Book assists in this lapse of meaning. The Book is a totalizing object, much like the figure of the Compendium, and yet this totalization lacks its final object of completed totality both because the figural Book is necessarily incomplete, and because the physical book is always-already a product of selection. Instead of achieving its end of being a place where everything takes place, it suffers from the lapse of writing, the discrepancy between event and concept. Derrida continues his exposition on Jabès by bringing to light yet another reflexive relation, a reversal of the relationship between the Book and the world. Derrida writes that, for Jabès, “the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.” 14 In addition to what was stated before, I take figuration to mean that the concepts employed, such as the Book or the Compendium, are not subject to the supposed rigor of analysis that is so prized by Enlightenment or Capitalist realisms. The figure of the Book and the figure of the Compendium cannot be held accountable to standards imported from scientific method, given an understanding that these standards require a concept to be replicable, consistent, falsifiable, measurable, and so on… This is an important point to make, especially in the present atmosphere within which theory must justify itself under conditions that are not its own. Instead of being held to these standards, figuration serves as a way in which to think about writing that leaves thought open to idealistic speculation, imperfect analogies, and most importantly the ever-present gain and loss that occur in the relationship between thought and being. By extension the figural way of addressing writing indulges in enough generalization to accommodate the excess/lack relationship between the ideal form of the Book or the Compendium, and the manifested and given body of a text (as it is practically completed and closed). Here we speak against the hostile atmosphere which would have theory submit itself to hierarchical rigor, rather than Blanchot’s “enigmatic rigor”, by being explicit about the discursive conditions and epistemic conditions under which theory operates. To write with parataxis in mind is, to a certain degree, to write with weakness as one’s methodology (with weak thought being in opposition to hypotaxis and hierarchy as much as weak thought can be in opposition to anything). Rather than asserting the strength of hierarchical theory, and rather than employing antagonistic argumentation with the goal of refutation different discursive and epistemic conditions for theory writing must be cultivated (and these are by no means new). First the critical and theoretical spirit reveals itself as being concerned with the task of complication—especially the complication and critique of binaries, dichotomies, dualities, polarities, paradoxes, parallaxes, hybridities, and especially antinomies. Second, theory positions itself as a sort of showing or revealing, rather than being ultimately focused on coming to full agreement or disagreement. This is where figuration can help theory-writing, both by placing emphasis on teleologies and trajectories (like parataxis and compilation), and by shifting focus away from pure primacy, power, or absolute origin. Figuration then, assists theory writing by placing the concern of theory outside of the concerns of the hard or soft sciences, and into the realm of thought or the idea. To speak of ‘the’ Compendium or ‘the’ Book, here, is to generalize not regarding the perfect form of the Compendium or Book, but to engage speculatively with an abstract idea which remains singular and yet complicated by multiplicity. The question of the Book that Derrida asks through Jabès is a question of everything and nothing, totality and nonbeing, and this question is a concern for writing and a concern for the figure of the Compendium so defined by the tension between compilation and selection, and parataxis and hypotaxis . On the note of nonbeing, we can look to the final page of Derrida’s first essay on Jabès in Writing and Difference and notice the introduction of his neologism, différance (with an ‘a’). Derrida writes: Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as différance . Books are always books of life (the archetype would be the Book of Life kept by the God of the Jews) or of afterlife (the archetype would be the Books of the Dead kept by the Egyptians). 15 This introduction of différance into the equation of the Book, alongside ontological affirmation and negation, hearkens back to the discussion of the symbolic lapse earlier in his essay. Differing and deferring, the Book is always a Book of Life and a figure for the intersection of the vital (life) and the total in writing. In a way, the writer of the Book may be someone who lives life, and in another way the writer of the book-as-object may be someone who engages in the act of writing, both practically (by inscribing words on paper, or typing script on a computer) and ontologically or symbolically (by investing their existence and inexistence into a work worthy of the figural Book). In addition to the writer as writer, the writer also serves as an editor, and the editorial role alongside the idea of the Compendium shows the editor to be one who collects and compiles, while being restrained by eventual selection and decision. Beyond this the editor of works and texts, in both the Book and the world, is engaged in a process of inscribing notation—of annotating (on) the Compendium. Eternal commentary is a feature of the textual Compendium, just as open-ended totality describes the ontological Compendium. The writer as writer does not simply write texts, but rather engages in a profoundly ontological act of inscribing their existence into the world, and the writer as editor does not merely annotate or alter texts as they are, but rather comments upon the text of the world. In/Conclusion So as we create texts, and as we write and create theory, let us be and remain attentive to the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book. These two concurrent metonymies are essential for total writing (grand theories, etc.), and may be forgettable for those concerned with fragmentary or hierarchical writing (which are valid in their own right). From the ontological and symbolic text of the world and phenomenological experience, to concrete texts such as books or mixed media, the figure of the Compendium and the figure of the Book are important for the actualization of the human will to be all-encompassing. The figure of the Compendium teaches writers of theory that the repetition, density, and fragility of parataxis offers a strong sort of weakness which does not become yet another variety of oppressive and hegemonic thought. Rather than write with hypotaxis in mind, subjugating one thought to another via cause and effect or antecedent and consequent, I would hope that theory-writing could guiltlessly indulge in the dialectical and contradictory conjugation of ideas, and take this as a legitimate methodology. Rather than being ashamed of showing resonances or giving way to abridgment or ellipses, it is my own authorial (but not authoritative) conviction that one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the fact that complete totalization is impossible, and one need not give up on totalizing and constructing grand theories because of the worry of violence, for the Book and the Compendium lack their completed object and are ever incomplete trajectories. NOTES * UPDATED 7/19/13: we've updated the HTML version to reflect the (correct) PDF version. Our apologies to the author—eds. 1. I would like extend thanks to Dr. Peter Schwenger of the University of Western Ontario for his comments on this paper and his hospitality as it was presented as a Theory Session at the Centre for Theory and Criticism on October 26th 2012. I would also like to thank Andrew Weiss for conversation and critique. 2. I should clarify my use of the term ‘figure’ at the outset. Given the use of the term by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Discourse, Figure (and also Gilles Deleuze in Francis Bacon ), I should state clearly that my use of the term will not correspond to the term ‘figure’ understood as the representation of an object. Instead, my use of the term ‘figure’ and its variations (‘figural’, ‘figurative’, ‘figuration’) will refer to the illustrative or metaphorical use of the Compendium or the Book as models or ways of thinking about writing and discourse. 3. Cf. Revelations 20:12-15. 4. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London & New York: Continuum Press, 1997). 5. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London & New York: Verso, 1990), ix-x. 6. I have written about this concept of being-towards-totality elsewhere in two pieces of writing: the first is called Notes on the Compendium (an unfinished draft) which addresses some very wide theoretical concerns, being structured as a sort of itinerary or archive, and the second is Dialectics Unbound (Punctum Books, 2013) which outlines a concept of totality without the violence of totalization. While these works are more concerned with ontological totality, here I would like to focus on the idea of the Compendium as a textual totality. 7. Cf. Louis Morelle, “Speculative Realism: After Finitude and Beyond, A vade mecum” in Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism . Issue 3 (Brooklyn, New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 241-272. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism . Trans. John Matthews (London & New York: Verso, 1974), 9. 9. Cf. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006). 10. Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing and Difference . Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65. 11. Ibid, 65. 12. Ibid, 71. 13. Ibid, 75. 14. Ibid, 76. 15. Ibid, 78. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary composition by (...) clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)

Ce chapitre présente le projet « Interphonologie du français contemporain » (IPFC), qui vise à constituer et analyser une large base de données de français langue étrangère produit par des apprenants de diverses L1. Nous illustrons ensuite la méthodologie adoptée dans le projet à travers le phénomène de la liaison. Après avoir exposé les enjeux de la liaison pour le français L2, nous présentons une étude préliminaire des réalisations de liaisons par des apprenants hispanophones et japonophones en lecture de texte (...) et montrons en quoi le projet IPFC est susceptible de fournir des données diversifiées en termes d’apprenants et de tâches, ce qui devrait, à terme, permettre un renouvellement des données pour l’enseignement de la liaison en français L2. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric on the Bleachers, or, The Rhetorician as MelancholiacPhilippe-Joseph SalazarThose who cannot remember rhetoric are condemned to repeat it.*French philosopher Jacques Bouveresse (2008) asks, in his most recent book, Why is it that we think we need literary works, in addition to science and philosophy, to help solve moral questions? As one reviewer notes, this comes as a surprise from a man “better known as a specialist of Wittgenstein, (...) who has always defended philosophy, often with scathing irony, against brainless realism, and, in any case, defended the prerogatives of a reason reasonably attentive to reality, a defense that led him to dismiss relativism and its mixing up of truth and verifiability with fallacy and verisimilitude” (Maggiori 2008). 1Bouveresse, who holds the chair of the philosophy of language and knowledge at Collège de France, and whose elevation to this hallowed professorship was portrayed as a revenge of sorts against Jacques Derrida, is not unimportant for those in rhetoric studies who have an interest in philosophy as well.2 He is the one who, with indeed scathing irony, unraveled the rhetorical stakes of the unrivaled Sokal truancy against Social Text (Bouveresse 1999), namely, how analogy provides a common ground for the literary and the scientific within public discourse.3Bouveresse (1999, 129) recalls, tongue in cheek, how that famed connoisseur in manipulations, [End Page 356] Alexander Zinoviev, explains, in The Yawning Heights (1979), that sciences produce their own “doubles” for the sake of public argument. The literary use of scientific analogy mimics the way in which ideology has to produce its own “doubles” in order to exist in public consciousness.For Bouveresse, literary intellectuals, and some philosophers, manufacture doubles of science because our life is lived under the shadow of science insofar as it has something to say about everything we do as moral agents or think in terms of practical reason. Analogy rules therefore by a popular demand for science. To question analogy in relation to ethics—belief and opinion, custom and habitus, temperament and character—under the gaze of the massive presence of science in public discourse (from campaign claims of “experience” to policy claims made on the basis of scientific knowledge) is at once to engage with rhetoric.4 It is to ask the question: Why do we feel that, alongside science, philosophy, and works of fiction, we need to listen to that double, “speeches,” to solve ethical problems?However, at this juncture, or crossroad where doubles point in various directions, rhetoricians have a choice among four attitudes, or four paths (to put it in Heideggerian fashion). Faced with the real, moral dangers inherent to analogy, one can (like Bouveresse) be combative and assert reason’s prerogative against the sophistry of doubles; one may defend analogy as morally grounded or even a means to resistance (hence, the moral incentive Bouveresse now attaches to fiction); one may argue for a culture replete with figurations (by and large, a matter of religious belief and faith as truth, which necessitates an analogical reading of this debased reality called “the world”); or one may, having already played on these teams, decide to stay on the bleachers, watch players of this three-cornered game, and fall into melancholy.Thomas Farrell was, I think, a melancholic rhetorician. I do not mean he was not here and there combative, or sanguine, or controversial, merely that from his writings emanates a stubborn melancholy regarding the destiny of rhetoric, or, to recall the epigram placed, ironically, at the top of this essay: “Those who cannot remember rhetoric are condemned to repeat it.” In essence, our public is a-rhetorical; it evolves in a world of instant communication, of short-lived prudence, of ever-disappearing persuasion, while, at the same time, it is made to cling to opinions raised to standards of absolute value and unnegotiable belief. The main reason why rhetoric is no longer a technē lies in this tension. It cannot be a technē because [End Page 357] its rules and artifacts are divorced from culture. It cannot be an epistēmē because its productions are singular constructions.Rhetoricians are not rhetors, and rhetors have long vanished. Indeed, there are eloquent... (shrink)

Dans un premier temps, cette contribution fournit une présentation rapide des corpus médiévaux, principalement pour l’anglais et le français, en relation avec des projets d’annotation centrés sur l’annotation syntaxique. La seconde partie traite des aspects spécifiques de l’annotation syntaxique pour les textes d’ancien français et s’intéresse particulièrement aux interactions entre la préannotation automatique et les outils d’annotation manuelle.

En nous appuyant sur la production et la diffusion de corpus audiovisuels via Internet, nous discutons d'une manière pratique et succincte la question de l'ouverture d'oeuvres intellectuelles monolingues qui possèdent un profil textuel bien déterminé à un « marché » de connaissances intrinsèquement multilingue et multiculturel qui est celui de l'Internet. Nous développons, plus particulièrement, la notion générale de la republication de corpus audiovisuels au sens de son adaptation - aussi bien linguistique et culturelle - sous forme de genre (...) de publication approprié à des contextes d'usage circonscrits. Des exemples du programme Archives audiovisuelles de la recherche et de projets de R&D européens et français nous serviront pour étayer notre propos.Relying on the production and dissemination of audiovisual corpus via the Internet, we discuss a practical and brief the issue of opening of intellectual works have a profile monolingual text well defined to a "market" inherently multilingual and multicultural knowledge that is the Internet. We develop, in particular, the general notion of republication of visual corpus within the meaning of adaptation - both linguistic and cultural - as a kind of publication in appropriate contexts of use contained. Examples of program Audiovisual Research Archives and R & D projects European and French will serve to substantiate our discussion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent legislation in Spain has transposed Directive 2010/64/EU, which recognises interpretation as an essential tool for safeguarding fairness in criminal proceedings, in particular, for preventing any state of defencelessness. Previous research, however, has suggested important deficiencies in court interpreting in this country. This article analyses court interpreting from Chinese to Spanish, based on a case study of a recording of a criminal trial that took place in Barcelona in February 2015. The trial was transcribed verbatim and annotated in accordance with (...) Cecilia Wadensjö’s distinction between “talk as text” and “talk as activity.” The analysis focuses on examples of errors of interpretation, speech style and non-renditions. The results are compared with those of a corpus of 55 court proceedings in which the interpretation was from Spanish to English and from French to Romanian. The article concludes with a discussion of the factors—s... (shrink)

The research on Tibetan speech synthesis technology has been mainly focusing on single dialect, and thus there is a lack of research on Tibetan multidialect speech synthesis technology. This paper presents an end-to-end Tibetan multidialect speech synthesis model to realize a speech synthesis system which can be used to synthesize different Tibetan dialects. Firstly, Wylie transliteration scheme is used to convert the Tibetan text into the corresponding Latin letters, which effectively reduces the size of training (...) corpus and the workload of front-end text processing. Secondly, a shared feature prediction network with a cyclic sequence-to-sequence structure is built, which maps the Latin transliteration vector of Tibetan character to Mel spectrograms and learns the relevant features of multidialect speech data. Thirdly, two dialect-specific WaveNet vocoders are combined with the feature prediction network, which synthesizes the Mel spectrum of Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral dialect into time-domain waveform, respectively. The model avoids using a large number of Tibetan dialect expertise for processing some time-consuming tasks, such as phonetic analysis and phonological annotation. Additionally, it can directly synthesize Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral speech on the existing text annotation. The experimental results show that the synthesized speech of Lhasa-Ü-Tsang and Amdo pastoral dialect based on our proposed method has better clarity and naturalness than the Tibetan monolingual model. (shrink)

Computational models of meaning trained on naturally occurring text successfully model human performance on tasks involving simple similarity measures, but they characterize meaning in terms of undifferentiated bags of words or topical dimensions. This has led some to question their psychological plausibility (Murphy, 2002;Schunn, 1999). We present here a fully automatic method for extracting a structured and comprehensive set of concept descriptions directly from an English part‐of‐speech‐tagged corpus. Concepts are characterized by weighted properties, enriched with concept–property types that (...) approximate classical relations such as hypernymy and function. Our model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept‐internal structures (discovering properties of concepts, grouping properties by property type) but also to inter‐concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property‐based approach. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion concepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exemplary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses' lexical approach and Stefanowitsch's metaphorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic prosody. (...) The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advantages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion concepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with information from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by revealing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying results, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contrastive studies. (shrink)

Professionals in various disciplines adopt significantly different lexicons to report their discoveries and arguments. Scientists discover, philosophers argue, whereas legal practitioners apply and consider. Reporting, as a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon, has its disciplinary characteristics. In court judgments, it reflects the way judges identify the evidence of different documents or other courts. In the self-built court judgment corpus, the paper focuses on the way that judicial arguments are constructed through reporting verbs. On the basis of the analysis of the representation and (...) distribution of reporting verbs in court judgments, the study identifies the reporting verbs with high frequencies in court judgments and compares these reporting verbs with those in the comparable reference corpus, written sampler of British National Corpus, which works as a reference corpus. It is found that the tokens of reporting verbs in court judgments are slightly less than those in general texts; the distribution pattern of the speech act verbs and mental verbs in the self-built court judgment corpus is similar to the pattern of two kinds of reporting verbs in the reference corpus; judicial speech act verbs are employed to express the authority of the statements, whereas the judicial mental verbs illustrate the legal reasoning process with individual agents; and there is a significant difference in terms of the reporting verbs’ frequencies within the court judgments and general texts. The results show that the reporting verbs in court judgments have their uniqueness, which may cast light on both judicial and pedagogical practices. (shrink)

Le projet ANR Profiterole avait pour objectifs la constitution de ressources pour le français médiéval (9e-15e s.) : un corpus annoté en (morpho-)syntaxe et des lexiques, la conception d'analyseurs syntaxiques pour le français médiéval, le développement d’outils de diffusion et d’analyse textométrique de l’annotation syntaxique dans le contexte de la plateforme TXM, et, enfin, la modélisation de certains aspects syntaxiques de l’évolution du français. Nous commençons par décrire la constitution du corpus Profiterole en termes de choix de textes, genres et (...) périodes et de types d’annotation. Puis nous présentons les modèles d’analyse syntaxique développés conjointement à la constitution du corpus, ainsi que la manière dont leurs prédictions ont été combinées pour assister la correction manuelle de l’annotation du corpus. Enfin, nous abordons les modalités de diffusion des données et modèles produits dans le cadre du projet avec un accent particulier sur l’intégration du corpus annoté à TXM, tant dans sa version en ligne accessible depuis le portail de la Base de français médiéval (BFM) que dans sa version pour ordinateur personnel, avec des exemples de requêtes CQP et TIGER facilitant l’exploration et l’analyse du corpus. (shrink)

This article reports a corpus-aided ecological discourse analysis of texts from an international mining company and an environmental advocacy group regarding a proposal to build a massive open-pit copper mine in the Santa Rita Mountains of Arizona, USA. The analysis details the grammatical and semantic clusters within the controversial environmental debate and how these clusters reflect the values and beliefs of each group as well as their conceptualization of the mountains and the environment. The integration of the ecolinguistic framework with (...) corpus linguistic methods of keyword analysis as well as part of speech and semantic tag analysis facilitated the identification of clusters of linguistic features perpetuating a dominant and ultimately destructive cultural discourse that places humans in a role of dominion and authority over the environment in the company texts. In contrast, clusters within the oppositional discourse forwarded by the environmental group promote the aesthetic value of the land and a need for responsible environmental stewardship. (shrink)

Becoming productive with grammatical categories is a gradual process in children's language development. Here, we investigated this transition process by focusing on Turkish causatives. Previous research examining spontaneous and elicited production of Turkish causatives with familiar verbs attested the onset and early stages of productivity at ages 2 to 3 (Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1985; Nakipoğlu, Uzundag, & Sarıgül, 2021). So far, however, we know very little about children's understanding of causatives with novel verbs. In the present study, we asked: (...) (a) When does the generalization of causative morphology in a novel context emerge? and (b) What role does child-directed input play in this development? To answer the first question, we conducted comprehension-judgment experiments with children aged 2;6–6;11 using pseudo-verbs (Study 1 & 2). Results showed that children preferred the Turkish causative suffix -DIr over an unrelated or no suffix to denote caused events earliest at age 4;10. To answer the second question, we analyzed child-directed speech from a longitudinal corpus of Turkish language acquisition (Study 3). Results showed that when addressing children younger than age 3, caregivers used the -DIr suffix with little variation considering the overall variability of verbs they could utter. Overall, these findings suggest that productivity with morphological causatives in a novel context emerges in a later stage of acquisition. This later development might partly be accounted for by the insufficient variation of morphological causatives in the early input. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the performance of baseline hidden Markov model (HMM) for segmentation of speech signals. It is applied on single-speaker segmentation task, using Hindi speech database. The automatic phoneme segmentation framework evolved imitates the human phoneme segmentation process. A set of 44 Hindi phonemes were chosen for the segmentation experiment, wherein we used continuous density hidden Markov model (CDHMM) with a mixture of Gaussian distribution. The left-to-right topology with no skip states has been selected as (...) it is effective in speech recognition due to its consistency with the natural way of articulating the spoken words. This system accepts speech utterances along with their orthographic “transcriptions” and generates segmentation information of the speech. This corpus was used to develop context-independent hidden Markov models (HMMs) for each of the Hindi phonemes. The system was trained using numerous sentences that are relevant to provide information to the passengers of the Metro Rail. The system was validated against a few manually segmented speech utterances. The evaluation of the experiments shows that the best performance is obtained by using a combination of two Gaussians mixtures and five HMM states. A category-wise phoneme error analysis has been performed, and the performance of the phonetic segmentation has been reported. The modeling of HMMs has been implemented using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (C++), and the system is designed to work on Windows operating system. The goal of this study is automatic segmentation of speech at phonetic level. (shrink)

This article presents a multimodal video corpus with the principal aim to model and predict the effects of aging in Mild Cognitive Impairment situation on pragmatic and communicative skills. We take as observable variables the verbal pragmatic markers and non-verbal pragmatic markers. This approach, at the interface of the psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences and rehabilitation medicine (speech-language pathology and therapy) is part of a longitudinal research process in an ecological situation (interviews conducted by close intimate of the elderly).In the first (...) part of the article we present the linguistic, cognitive and social characteristics of aging in its continuum up to mild cognitive impairment and pathological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. In the second part, we develop a multimodal approach, in particular to inform and enrich speech and language therapy knowledge. Finally, we present our experimental design and preliminary results on two female participants over 75 years of age with mild cognitive impairment.Our general findings indicate that with aging, verbal pragmatic markers acquire an interactive function that allows people with Mild Cognitive Impairment to maintain intersubjective relationships with their interlocutor. In addition, at the non-verbal level, gestural manifestations are increasingly mobilized over time with a preference for non-verbal pragmatic markers with a referential function and an interactive function. One such non-verbal manifestation compensates for naming deficits, planning difficulties, discursive hitches; while another optimizes and maintains the interaction with the interlocutor.Clinicians have a duty to develop their professional practice through an evidence-based clinical approach whose main objective is to reconcile clinical practice with the best evidence from research (Dollaghan 2007). In the case of speech-language pathology, clinicians consider themselves very limited in this approach (Lof 2011; McCurtin 2011), especially for patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (Mungas et al. 2010; Hopper 2013; Morello 2017) and more specifically when it comes to assessing or supporting language functions (Cummings 2014).The studies focusing on Mild Cognitive Impairment require longitudinal corpora i) to understand the naturally occurring evolutions in subjects, ii) the implication of the cognitive reserve in each individual, and iii) to take advantage of these parameters as evidence for research and earlier rehabilitation. We aim to show the benefits of linguistic and interactional scientific investigation methods through fragile aging, for health professionals and everyday caregivers. (shrink)

Le module ESLO-Enfants est un corpus variationniste longitudinal issu du grand corpus de langue française : Enquêtes SocioLinguistiques à Orléans (ESLO). Variationniste car il s’appuie sur un public varié (enfants de 2 ans à 7 ans avec leur entourage proche) provenant de familles de différentes catégories socio-économico-culturelles et enregistré dans des situations naturelles variées formant le quotidien des enfants. Ce corpus, qui sera mis à disposition à la fois sur ESLO et Childes, a été créé dans le but d’étudier l’impact (...) de l’environnement langagier (input) sur les productions enfantines (output). Pour cette étude, la liaison, objet à la fois stable et variable, s’est révélée être un phénomène sociolinguistique propice pour observer sa transmission à des enfants en cours d’acquisition du langage mais aussi pour observer d’éventuelles différences entre les familles. (shrink)