& she was like "O_O" : Animation of reported speech on Twitter

This study relates discourse-pragmatic aspects of the use of the quotatives say, be like, be all, and go to the question of the supposed or actual spoken-likeness of written computer-mediated communication (CMC). 1,800 tokens of reported speech, collected from Twitter, were analyzed in a “constructed dialogue” framework (Tannen, 2007). The results show that users of Twitter employ various CMC devices to animate and modally enrich reported speech, especially in speech reports with be like, be all, and go. They perform a style of communication that is reminiscent of conversational speech, even while having qualities that seem to belong uniquely to CMC.

Analysis of speech fluency in Williams syndrome

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder, often referred as being characterized by dissociation between verbal and non-verbal abilities, although the number of studies disputing this proposal is emerging. Indeed, although they have been traditionally reported as displaying increased speech fluency, this topic has not been fully addressed in research. In previous studies carried out with a small group of individuals with WS, we reported speech breakdowns during conversational and autobiographical narratives suggestive of language difficulties. In the current study, we characterized the speech fluency profile using an ecologically based measure - a narrative task (story generation) was collected from a group of individuals with WS (n = 30) and typically developing group (n = 39) matched in mental age. Oral narratives were elicited using a picture stimulus - the cookie theft picture from Boston Diagnosis Aphasia Test. All narratives were analyzed according to typology and frequency of fluency breakdowns (non-stuttered and stuttered disfluencies). Oral narratives in WS group differed from typically developing group, mainly due to a significant increase in the frequency of disfluencies, particularly in terms of hesitations, repetitions and pauses. This is the first evidence of disfluencies in WS using an ecologically based task (oral narrative task), suggesting that these speech disfluencies may represent a significant marker of language problems in WS. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Script proposals: a device for empowering clients in counselling

Much of the research on the delivery of advice by professionals such as physicians, health workers and counsellors, both on the telephone and in face to face interaction more generally, has focused on the theme of client resistance and the consequent need for professionals to adopt particular formats to assist in the uptake of the advice. In this paper we consider one setting, Kid’s Helpline, the national Australian counselling service for children and young people, where there is an institutional mandate not to give explicit advice in accordance with the values of self-direction and empowerment. The paper examines one practice, the use of script proposals by counsellors, which appears to offer a way of providing support which is consistent with these values. Script proposals entail the counsellors packaging their advice as something that the caller might say – at some future time – to a third party such as a friend, teacher, parent, or partner, and involve the counsellor adopting the speaking position of the caller in what appears as a rehearsal of a forthcoming strip of interaction. Although the core feature of a script proposal is the counsellor’s use of direct reported speech they appear to be delivered, not so much as exact words to be followed, but as the type of conversation that the client needs to have with the 3rd party. Script proposals, in short, provide models of what to say as well as alluding to how these could be emulated by the client. In their design script proposals invariably incorporate one or more of the most common rhetorical formats for maximising the persuasive force of an utterance such as a three part list or a contrastive pair. Script proposals, moreover, stand in a complex relation to the prior talk and one of their functions appears to be to summarise, respecify or expand upon the client’s own ideas or suggestions for problem solving that have emerged in these preceding sequences.

“A problem of versions” : laying down the law in the school playground

Purpose This chapter investigates an episode where a supervising teacher on playground duty asks two boys to each give an account of their actions over an incident that had just occurred on some climbing equipment in the playground. Methodology This paper employs an ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis. The data are taken from a corpus of video recorded interactions of children, aged 7-9 years, and the teacher, in school playgrounds during the lunch recess. Findings The findings show the ways that children work up accounts of their playground practices when asked by the teacher. The teacher initially provided interactional space for each child to give their version of the events. Ultimately, the teacher’s version of how to act in the playground became the sanctioned one. The children and the teacher formulated particular social orders of behavior in the playground through multi-modal devices, direct reported speech and scripts. Such public displays of talk work as socialization practices that frame teacher-sanctioned morally appropriate actions in the playground. Value of paper This chapter shows the pervasiveness of the teacher’s social order, as she presented an institutional social order of how to interact in the playground, showing clearly the disjunction of adult-child orders between the teacher and children.

Estudos para composição do eu e do(s) outro(s): enunciação, polifonia e imagens discursivas na cartilha da Campanha Nacional O Petróleo Tem que Ser Nosso

O anúncio dos gigantescos campos do pré-sal brasileiro recolocou o petróleo no alvo dos holofotes. A propriedade desta imensa riqueza e as inevitáveis mudanças na legislação do setor são as principais questões que derivam deste fato. Com efeito, temos assistido a uma proliferação de discursos acerca do tema. Esta dissertação se insere num conjunto de reflexões que tomam o petróleo como objeto de interesse. Privilegiamos um espaço específico de produção discursiva, a saber, o instituído pela Campanha Nacional O Petróleo Tem que Ser Nosso. Um primeiro procedimento metodológico de coleta de dados possibilitou identificar que, entre os seus materiais de mobilização, ganha destaque a cartilha de massas do movimento, que desde julho de 2009 circula pelo território nacional. Inscritos numa perspectiva da Análise do Discurso de base enunciativa, cuidamos de construir uma reflexão sobre alguns dos modos de inscrição do(s) sujeito(s) no discurso. Nossas considerações acerca dos gêneros do discurso revelaram o hibridismo da cartilha; tal peculiaridade nos obrigou a construir dispositivos distintos de análise. Num primeiro memento, decidimos observar as marcas de pessoa, os marcadores temporais e espaciais, com vistas a identificar uma dada cenografia discursiva (Maingueneau, 1997) que nos remetesse às imagens dos coenunciadores; consideramos, num segundo momento, os discursos relatados (Bakhtin, 2006; Authier-Revuz, 1998 e outros) para compreender a polifonia inerente à cartilha. Nossa análise verificou de que maneira um regime de verdade e uma memória se instituem pela cenografia discursiva; a análise dos discursos relatados, com ênfase nos discursos direto, indireto e narrativizado, nos permitiu identificar, no agenciamento das vozes, um espaço de confronto entre formações discursivas divergentes

Językowe środki wyrażania postawy mówiącego w łotewskich debatach sejmowych

Wydział Neofilologii: Instytut Językoznawstwa

Oralidade e escrita: a presença do discurso reportado em entrevistas jornalísticas

In this work, we intend to discuss results from a research about retextualization in gender journalistic interview, considering speech dialogical approach. Retextualization activity, which implies the production of a new text through one or more basic texts, shows the presence of reported speech as an integral unit of discursive construction. Our corpus had been extracted from a section called Nossos Valores [Our Values], present at the syndical newspaper Adurn Notícias [Adurn News], from Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil), which weekly publishes journalistic interviews with active professors from this institution. We describe retextualised text structure by correlating it to the one from the oral text, in order to identify and describe quoted speech, as well as features of the gender in which it is inserted. It was verified that, when it comes to reported speech present in the published interviews, which are representative of the research corpus, diverse incorporation procedures of alien property‟s speech take place, especially those regarding about reported speech use. The waterish presence of the other present in dialoged texts speech transformed in monologue texts demonstrates that there is not a clear demarcation among voices in certain parts of the written text. This is confirmed during analyses of the two interview versions, in which it is not always possible to distinguish the authorship of certain propositions, which in some way can point to Bakhtin‟s concept of intentional hybridity. Beyond Bakhtin‟s contributions (1990; 2000), the theoretical principles of this work are based upon Marcuschi (1986; 1999; 2001), Matencio (2003), Authier-Revuz (1982), and Favero et al. (1997; 1998; 1999; 2000)

Tradurre il discorso riportato. Le versioni italiane di "Nana" di Emile Zola (1880-2010)

Il nostro lavoro si inserisce tra i contributi che si rifanno a quella branca di studi traduttologici nota come critica della traduzione; l’elemento di raccordo tra il testo di partenza e la successione dei testi di arrivo su cui baseremo l’analisi è il discorso riportato, un fenomeno complesso, che trova la sua naturale collocazione nei delicati rapporti che intercorrono tra orale e scritto.

El discurso narrativizado y las normalizaciones citativas : Dos formas solapadas de caracterizar la palabra ajena

Este trabajo de investigación tiene por objeto demostrar que, dentro de un continuum que existe en la reformulación del discurso ajeno en el propio, donde se pasa de una forma a otra casi sin solución de continuidad, se puede hablar de una gradación entre un polo más objetivo (o con pretensión de mayor objetividad) a un polo más subjetivo, donde la interpretación tendría un papel más significativo. El polo más objetivo lo ubicaríamos en el extremo izquierdo y lo ejemplificaríamos con el discurso directo, mientras que el polo más subjetivo ocuparía el extremo derecho y estaría representado por el discurso narrativizado y las nominalizaciones citativas. En medio de estos dos polos se encontrarían todas las demás formas de discurso referido. En el campo del discurso periodístico, donde la investigación fue realizada, se pudo corroborar que existe, en la mayoría de los casos, una elección por parte del locutor (en este caso el periodista) de utilizar una forma u otra. Podría ser objetivo para posteriores estudios el de determinar el criterio que prevalece en esta elección.

El discurso narrativizado y las normalizaciones citativas : Dos formas solapadas de caracterizar la palabra ajena

Este trabajo de investigación tiene por objeto demostrar que, dentro de un continuum que existe en la reformulación del discurso ajeno en el propio, donde se pasa de una forma a otra casi sin solución de continuidad, se puede hablar de una gradación entre un polo más objetivo (o con pretensión de mayor objetividad) a un polo más subjetivo, donde la interpretación tendría un papel más significativo. El polo más objetivo lo ubicaríamos en el extremo izquierdo y lo ejemplificaríamos con el discurso directo, mientras que el polo más subjetivo ocuparía el extremo derecho y estaría representado por el discurso narrativizado y las nominalizaciones citativas. En medio de estos dos polos se encontrarían todas las demás formas de discurso referido. En el campo del discurso periodístico, donde la investigación fue realizada, se pudo corroborar que existe, en la mayoría de los casos, una elección por parte del locutor (en este caso el periodista) de utilizar una forma u otra. Podría ser objetivo para posteriores estudios el de determinar el criterio que prevalece en esta elección.

El discurso narrativizado y las normalizaciones citativas : Dos formas solapadas de caracterizar la palabra ajena

Este trabajo de investigación tiene por objeto demostrar que, dentro de un continuum que existe en la reformulación del discurso ajeno en el propio, donde se pasa de una forma a otra casi sin solución de continuidad, se puede hablar de una gradación entre un polo más objetivo (o con pretensión de mayor objetividad) a un polo más subjetivo, donde la interpretación tendría un papel más significativo. El polo más objetivo lo ubicaríamos en el extremo izquierdo y lo ejemplificaríamos con el discurso directo, mientras que el polo más subjetivo ocuparía el extremo derecho y estaría representado por el discurso narrativizado y las nominalizaciones citativas. En medio de estos dos polos se encontrarían todas las demás formas de discurso referido. En el campo del discurso periodístico, donde la investigación fue realizada, se pudo corroborar que existe, en la mayoría de los casos, una elección por parte del locutor (en este caso el periodista) de utilizar una forma u otra. Podría ser objetivo para posteriores estudios el de determinar el criterio que prevalece en esta elección.

EmotiBlog: a finer-grained and more precise learning of subjectivity expression models

The exponential growth of the subjective information in the framework of the Web 2.0 has led to the need to create Natural Language Processing tools able to analyse and process such data for multiple practical applications. They require training on specifically annotated corpora, whose level of detail must be fine enough to capture the phenomena involved. This paper presents EmotiBlog – a fine-grained annotation scheme for subjectivity. We show the manner in which it is built and demonstrate the benefits it brings to the systems using it for training, through the experiments we carried out on opinion mining and emotion detection. We employ corpora of different textual genres –a set of annotated reported speech extracted from news articles, the set of news titles annotated with polarity and emotion from the SemEval 2007 (Task 14) and ISEAR, a corpus of real-life self-expressed emotion. We also show how the model built from the EmotiBlog annotations can be enhanced with external resources. The results demonstrate that EmotiBlog, through its structure and annotation paradigm, offers high quality training data for systems dealing both with opinion mining, as well as emotion detection.

Token codeswitching and language alternation in narrative discourse: a functional-pragmatic approach

This study is concerned with two phenomena of language alternation in biographic narrations in Yiddish and Low German, based on spoken language data recorded between 1988 and 1995. In both phenomena language alternation serves as an additional communicative tool which can be applied by bilingual speakers to enlarge their set of interactional devices in order to ensure a smoother or more pointed processing of communicative aims. The first phenomenon is a narrative strategy I call Token Cod-eswitching: In a bilingual narrative culminating in a line of reported speech, a single element of L2 indicates the original language of the reconstructed dialogue – a token for a quote. The second phenomenon has to do with directing procedures, carried out by the speaker and aimed at guiding the hearer's attention, which are frequently carried out in L2, supporting the hearer's attention at crucial points in the interaction. Both phenomena are analyzed following a model of narrative discourse as proposed in the framework of Functional Pragmatics. The model allows the adoption of an integral approach to previous findings in code-switching research.