Perceval tra epos e romanzo: genesi, ricezione e tradizioni testuali. Con edizione critica del Livre d‘Helias et Perceval

La tesi si propone di descrivere le diverse fasi storiche attraverso le quali si è evoluta la struttura narrativa del personaggio di Perceval nei primi due secoli della sua genesi nella letteratura romanza ed europea. Il personaggio ha avuto un notevole successo dal Medioevo di Chrétien of Troyes fino all'età moderna e contemporanea. Lo studio filologico dell'evoluzione del personaggio all'interno della galassia testuale e delle forme della sua tradizione permette di delineare un quadro composito, in cui è possibile rintracciare la genesi e lo sviluppo di importanti fenomeni storico-letterari, destinati a influenzare la letteratura europea e occidentale nel lungo periodo. Una seconda parte è invece dedicata allo studio della struttura letteraria e narrativa del personaggio rintracciabile all'interno della lettura delle differenti opere che tramandano le versioni della storia di Perceval. Infine, la ricerca si concentra su un caso di studio in grado di illuminare la persistenza delle strutture sopra individuate: le Prophecies de Merlin, romanzo arturiano della seconda metà del XIII secolo, sono infatti espressione delle modalità in cui la storia della vita di Perceval viene messa in scena in testi che non si concentrano direttamente sulla sua biografia. All'interno della tradizione delle Prophecies de Merlin, il profeta del regno arturiano di cui sono raccolte numerose profezie, il caso del Livre d'Helias et Perceval è emblematico. Il Livre d'Helias et Perceval delle Prophecies de Merlin, accompagnato da uno studio filologico che comprende un'edizione critica, uno studio completo della tradizione e un'analisi linguistica, si propone quindi come caso di studio ideale per analizzare la fortuna e l'evoluzione del personaggio di Perceval nel Medioevo romanzesco ed europeo.

Design, development and first evaluation of a client/server system for managing and querying linguistic corpora

This thesis is concerned with the role played by software tools in the analysis and dissemination of linguistic corpora and their contribution to a more widespread adoption of corpora in different fields. Chapter 1 contains an overview of some of the most relevant corpus analysis tools available today, presenting their most interesting features and some of their drawbacks. Chapter 2 begins with an explanation of the reasons why none of the available tools appear to satisfy the requirements of the user community and then continues with technical overview of the current status of the new system developed as part of this work. This presentation is followed by highlights of features that make the system appealing to users and corpus builders (i.e. scholars willing to make their corpora available to the public). The chapter concludes with an indication of future directions for the projects and information on the current availability of the software. Chapter 3 describes the design of an experiment devised to evaluate the usability of the new system in comparison to another corpus tool. Usage of the tool was tested in the context of a documentation task performed on a real assignment during a translation class in a master's degree course. In chapter 4 the findings of the experiment are presented on two levels of analysis: firstly a discussion on how participants interacted with and evaluated the two corpus tools in terms of interface and interaction design, usability and perceived ease of use. Then an analysis follows of how users interacted with corpora to complete the task and what kind of queries they submitted. Finally, some general conclusions are drawn and areas for future work are outlined.

Investigating interpreter-mediated interaction in the Chinese bilingual courtroom: Analysis based on a multimodal corpus

This research project is based on the Multimodal Corpus of Chinese Court Interpreting (MUCCCI [mutʃɪ]), a small-scale multimodal corpus on the basis of eight authentic court hearings with Chinese-English interpreting in Mainland China. The corpus has approximately 92,500 word tokens in total. Besides the transcription of linguistic and para-linguistic features, utilizing the facial expression classification rules suggested by Black and Yacoob (1995), MUCCCI also includes approximately 1,200 annotations of facial expressions linked to the six basic types of human emotions, namely, anger, disgust, happiness, surprise, sadness, and fear (Black & Yacoob, 1995). This thesis is an example of conducting qualitative analysis on interpreter-mediated courtroom interactions through a multimodal corpus. In particular, miscommunication events (MEs) and the reasons behind them were investigated in detail. During the analysis, although queries were conducted based on non-verbal annotations when searching for MEs, both verbal and non-verbal features were considered indispensable parts contributing to the entire context. This thesis also includes a detailed description of the compilation process of MUCCCI utilizing ELAN, from data collection to transcription, POS tagging and non-verbal annotation. The research aims at assessing the possibility and feasibility of conducting qualitative analysis through a multimodal corpus of court interpreting. The concept of integrating both verbal and non-verbal features to contribute to the entire context is emphasized. The qualitative analysis focusing on MEs can provide an inspiration for improving court interpreters’ performances. All the constraints and difficulties presented can be regarded as a reference for similar research in the future.