Causación y ergatividad en la semántica relacional

En el marco de la gramática contrastiva entre inglés y castellano, asumimos la perspectiva generativista, según la cual la sintaxis humana resulta de procesos derivacionales que combinan, por medio de mecanismos innatos, elementos capaces de codificar significados primitivos. Trabajamos con datos, ya sea reales o inventados, que ilustran los distintos tipos de oraciones ?gramaticales? posibles en una lengua natural. Nos centramos en la noción de ?ergatividad?, utilizada por distintas teorías para explicar fenómenos sintácticos y semánticos no siempre coincidentes. Desde el Funcionalismo/Cognitivismo norteamericano, Scott DeLancey (2001) compara distintas lenguas y distingue morfológicamente los sujetos ?agentivos? en estructuras causadas de los sujetos ?afectados? en estructuras no causadas. Según la Lingüística Sistémica Funcional (Halliday 1985, 2004), la ergatividad abarca, no sólo la presencia o ausencia de Causa en un proceso particular, sino también la relación causal que vincula distintos procesos entre sí. El esquema ergativo de Halliday incluye, además de pares constituidos por eventos de cambio de estado no causados y de causa externa, eventos inergativos de causa externa, y eventos transitivos instigados por otro proceso, expresado lingüísticamente o bien inferido. Desde la perspectiva de la Semántica Relacional (Mateu, 2002), reducimos el número de ?constructos primitivos? disponibles de tres a dos. Consideramos dos alternancias: la ergativo-transitiva y la causa interna/externa con inergativos. No vinculamos ni sintáctica ni derivacionalmente las construcciones transitivas con los eventos inferidos que las instigan. Justificamos la relación derivacional que vincula las construcciones pasivas estáticas con las construcciones ergativas de verbos naturalmente alternantes, por un lado, y, con las construcciones transitivas de verbos de ?locatum? y de inergativos, por el otro. Reanalizamos, respecto de la bibliografía canónica, la naturaleza del clítico ?se? en las construcciones ergativas españolas. Este análisis orienta de manera teórica el abordaje de las construcciones pertinentes, y ofrece equivalencias posibles que pueden resultar útiles para la traducción

Causación y ergatividad en la semántica relacional

En el marco de la gramática contrastiva entre inglés y castellano, asumimos la perspectiva generativista, según la cual la sintaxis humana resulta de procesos derivacionales que combinan, por medio de mecanismos innatos, elementos capaces de codificar significados primitivos. Trabajamos con datos, ya sea reales o inventados, que ilustran los distintos tipos de oraciones ?gramaticales? posibles en una lengua natural. Nos centramos en la noción de ?ergatividad?, utilizada por distintas teorías para explicar fenómenos sintácticos y semánticos no siempre coincidentes. Desde el Funcionalismo/Cognitivismo norteamericano, Scott DeLancey (2001) compara distintas lenguas y distingue morfológicamente los sujetos ?agentivos? en estructuras causadas de los sujetos ?afectados? en estructuras no causadas. Según la Lingüística Sistémica Funcional (Halliday 1985, 2004), la ergatividad abarca, no sólo la presencia o ausencia de Causa en un proceso particular, sino también la relación causal que vincula distintos procesos entre sí. El esquema ergativo de Halliday incluye, además de pares constituidos por eventos de cambio de estado no causados y de causa externa, eventos inergativos de causa externa, y eventos transitivos instigados por otro proceso, expresado lingüísticamente o bien inferido. Desde la perspectiva de la Semántica Relacional (Mateu, 2002), reducimos el número de ?constructos primitivos? disponibles de tres a dos. Consideramos dos alternancias: la ergativo-transitiva y la causa interna/externa con inergativos. No vinculamos ni sintáctica ni derivacionalmente las construcciones transitivas con los eventos inferidos que las instigan. Justificamos la relación derivacional que vincula las construcciones pasivas estáticas con las construcciones ergativas de verbos naturalmente alternantes, por un lado, y, con las construcciones transitivas de verbos de ?locatum? y de inergativos, por el otro. Reanalizamos, respecto de la bibliografía canónica, la naturaleza del clítico ?se? en las construcciones ergativas españolas. Este análisis orienta de manera teórica el abordaje de las construcciones pertinentes, y ofrece equivalencias posibles que pueden resultar útiles para la traducción

Causación y ergatividad en la semántica relacional

En el marco de la gramática contrastiva entre inglés y castellano, asumimos la perspectiva generativista, según la cual la sintaxis humana resulta de procesos derivacionales que combinan, por medio de mecanismos innatos, elementos capaces de codificar significados primitivos. Trabajamos con datos, ya sea reales o inventados, que ilustran los distintos tipos de oraciones ?gramaticales? posibles en una lengua natural. Nos centramos en la noción de ?ergatividad?, utilizada por distintas teorías para explicar fenómenos sintácticos y semánticos no siempre coincidentes. Desde el Funcionalismo/Cognitivismo norteamericano, Scott DeLancey (2001) compara distintas lenguas y distingue morfológicamente los sujetos ?agentivos? en estructuras causadas de los sujetos ?afectados? en estructuras no causadas. Según la Lingüística Sistémica Funcional (Halliday 1985, 2004), la ergatividad abarca, no sólo la presencia o ausencia de Causa en un proceso particular, sino también la relación causal que vincula distintos procesos entre sí. El esquema ergativo de Halliday incluye, además de pares constituidos por eventos de cambio de estado no causados y de causa externa, eventos inergativos de causa externa, y eventos transitivos instigados por otro proceso, expresado lingüísticamente o bien inferido. Desde la perspectiva de la Semántica Relacional (Mateu, 2002), reducimos el número de ?constructos primitivos? disponibles de tres a dos. Consideramos dos alternancias: la ergativo-transitiva y la causa interna/externa con inergativos. No vinculamos ni sintáctica ni derivacionalmente las construcciones transitivas con los eventos inferidos que las instigan. Justificamos la relación derivacional que vincula las construcciones pasivas estáticas con las construcciones ergativas de verbos naturalmente alternantes, por un lado, y, con las construcciones transitivas de verbos de ?locatum? y de inergativos, por el otro. Reanalizamos, respecto de la bibliografía canónica, la naturaleza del clítico ?se? en las construcciones ergativas españolas. Este análisis orienta de manera teórica el abordaje de las construcciones pertinentes, y ofrece equivalencias posibles que pueden resultar útiles para la traducción

Technologizing inhumanity: A discursive practice

A political interview intended to justify refugee detention in Australia is analysed using an interdisciplinary critical discourse method. Barthesian semiotic theory in which the 'Other' is the foundation of national myth provides a context for a close textual analysis using Hallidayan linguistics. The lexico-grammatical analysis identifies features associated with processes (verbs), grammatical metaphors, and nominals. Essentially, the effect is to blunt agency and distance the speaker, but, more importantly, create a classificatory system that allows humans to be treated in certain ways according to bureaucratic procedures. The discursive strategy is labelled technologizing the inhumane because it objectifies the subjective, turning profound human issues into technical issues. Analysed discursively, the interview reveals how discursive control is established and how democracy is represented as impeding the orderly procedure of 'objective' procedures.

Authorship Attribution with Support Vector Machines

In this paper we explore the use of text-mining methods for the identification of the author of a text. We apply the support vector machine (SVM) to this problem, as it is able to cope with half a million of inputs it requires no feature selection and can process the frequency vector of all words of a text. We performed a number of experiments with texts from a German newspaper. With nearly perfect reliability the SVM was able to reject other authors and detected the target author in 60–80% of the cases. In a second experiment, we ignored nouns, verbs and adjectives and replaced them by grammatical tags and bigrams. This resulted in slightly reduced performance. Author detection with SVMs on full word forms was remarkably robust even if the author wrote about different topics.

Linguistic determinism and theory of mind in deaf children

DeVilliers and DeVilliers (2000, 2005) propose that deaf and hearing children acquire a theory of mind (or the understanding that human behaviour is the product of psychological states like true and false beliefs) as a consequence of their linguistic mastery of a rule of syntax. Specifically, they argue that the syntactic rule for sentential complementation with verbs of speech (e.g., “say”) precedes syntactic mastery of complementation for cognition (e.g., “think”) and both of these developmentally precede and promote conceptual mastery of a theory of mind (ToM), as indexed via success on standard false belief tests. The present study examined this proposition in groups of primary-school-aged deaf children and hearing preschoolers who took false belief tests and a modified memory for complements test that included control questions. Guttman scaling techniques indicated no support either for the prediction that syntactic skill precedes ToM understanding or for the earlier emergence of complementation for “say” than for “think”. Methodological issues and implications for deaf children's ToM development are discussed.

Back from the future:the second chance in the past of aller + infinitive

Typological studies (Bybee et al. 1994, Dahl 2000, Bourdin 2008 among many others) have shown a tendency for spatial elements (such as movement verbs) to grammaticalise into temporal expressions. The periphrasis made of aller + infinitive has been very productive in Romance languages. If in French, Spanish or Portuguese, it refers to future, it refers to a simple past in Catalan. fr.: je vais aller au cinéma esp.: voy a ir al cine pt. Vou ira o cine cat.: vaig anar al cine Barceló & Bres (2005:168) indicate that, In French, «vers le XVIème siècle, […] la périphrase a brièvement fonctionné comme un temps du passé (alors même que l’emploi comme temps du futur émergeait)»: (1) Sur ces propos, firent leur accord et, en regardant le lieu le plus propre pour faire cette belle œuvre, elle va dire qu’elle n’en savait point de meilleure ni plus loin de tout soupçon, qu’une petite maison qui était dedans le parc, où il y avait chambre et lit tout à propos. (Marguerite de Navarre, L’Heptaméron) The future value took over so much so that Damourette & Pichon (1911-1936 :117) claimed the past value had disappeared»: Un second tour, encore plus aberrant, n’a plus, que nous sachions, aucune position en pays d’Oui. Nous voulons parler de l’expression d’un passé au moyen de l’auxiliaire aller, suivi de l’infinitif. Ce tour a eu une grande fortune dans le provençal ancien et le catalan […] En français, on n’en trouve que des traces, notamment du XIVe au XVIe siècles . Ex.:[…] Adoncques s’arrêtèrent le conte et Raimondin soubz un grand arbre ; lors va dire le conte à Raimondin: […]. Et Raimondin va lui dire : Sire, ce qu’il vous plaira. That allegedly extinct use is nonetheless alive and kicking in Contemporary French. Larreya (2005:349)notes that it is « très courant dans les récits – en particulier dans les récits oraux» and it is also found in newspaper language as shown by this except from an obituary for Loulou Gasté (Le Monde 1995): (2) Celle-ci se déroule aux Editions Micro, où il a un bureau. Séduit par la jeune interprète, il commence à lui écrire des chansons sur mesure et leur complicité va mettre cinq ans à se transformer en amour. Au début de leur rencontre, Loulou est neurasthénique parce qu’il vient de divorcer et la future Line, exclusivement préoccupée par son métier, ne songe à rien d’autre. Line et Loulou vont rattraper le temps perdu et créer ensemble un millier de petites chansons dont la plupart sont devenues immortelles. Jusqu’à ces derniers mois, il ne va pas se passer une journée sans que Loulou s’empare de sa guitare pour créer un refrain. Would we be witnessing a linguistic resurrection? The same structure seems therefore to have grammaticalised in diverging and even diametrically opposite ways in different Romance languages. In this talk, we shall try to explain how the phrase aller + infinitive is able to function both as a future and a past. We will especially concentrate on the case of contemporary French where, while the future interpretation has obtained the status of tense as futur proche or périphrastique, a past interpretation is now commonplace. Our reflection will be supported by a personal corpus of authentic examples.

The role of pragmatics for grammatical change: the case of preverbal non

What is the role of pragmatics in the evolution of grammatical paradigms? It is to maintain marked candidates that may come to be the default expression. This perspective is validated by the Jespersen cycle, where the standard expression of sentential negation is renewed as pragmatically marked negatives achieve default status. How status changes are effected, however, remains to be documented. This is what is achieved in this paper that looks at the evolution of preverbal negative non in Old and Middle French. The negative, which categorically marks pragmatic activation (Dryer 1996) with finite verbs in Old French, loses this value when used with non-finite verbs in Middle French. This process is accompanied by competing semantic reanalyses of the distribution of infinitives negated in this way, and by the co-occurrence with a greater lexical variety of verbs. The absence of pragmatic contribution should lead the marker to take on the role of default, which is already fulfilled by a well-established ne ... pas, pushing non to decline. Hard empirical evidence is thus provided that validates the assumed role of pragmatics in the Jespersen cycle, supporting the general view of pragmatics as supporting alternative candidates that may or may not achieve default status in the evolution of a grammatical paradigm.

Tense, aspect and modality in first and second language

Time after time… and aspect and mood. Over the last twenty five years, the study of time, aspect and - to a lesser extent - mood acquisition has enjoyed increasing popularity and a constant widening of its scope. In such a teeming field, what can be the contribution of this book? We believe that it is unique in several respects. First, this volume encompasses studies from different theoretical frameworks: functionalism vs generativism or function-based vs form-based approaches. It also brings together various sub-fields (first and second language acquisition, child and adult acquisition, bilingualism) that tend to evolve in parallel rather than learn from each other. A further originality is that it focuses on a wide range of typologically different languages, and features less studied languages such as Korean and Bulgarian. Finally, the book gathers some well-established scholars, young researchers, and even research students, in a rich inter-generational exchange, that ensures the survival but also the renewal and the refreshment of the discipline. The book at a glance The first part of the volume is devoted to the study of child language acquisition in monolingual, impaired and bilingual acquisition, while the second part focuses on adult learners. In this section, we will provide an overview of each chapter. The first study by Aviya Hacohen explores the acquisition of compositional telicity in Hebrew L1. Her psycholinguistic approach contributes valuable data to refine theoretical accounts. Through an innovating methodology, she gathers information from adults and children on the influence of definiteness, number, and the mass vs countable distinction on the constitution of a telic interpretation of the verb phrase. She notices that the notion of definiteness is mastered by children as young as 10, while the mass/count distinction does not appear before 10;7. However, this does not entail an adult-like use of telicity. She therefore concludes that beyond definiteness and noun type, pragmatics may play an important role in the derivation of Hebrew compositional telicity. For the second chapter we move from a Semitic language to a Slavic one. Milena Kuehnast focuses on the acquisition of negative imperatives in Bulgarian, a form that presents the specificity of being grammatical only with the imperfective form of the verb. The study examines how 40 Bulgarian children distributed in two age-groups (15 between 2;11-3;11, and 25 between 4;00 and 5;00) develop with respect to the acquisition of imperfective viewpoints, and the use of imperfective morphology. It shows an evolution in the recourse to expression of force in the use of negative imperatives, as well as the influence of morphological complexity on the successful production of forms. With Yi-An Lin’s study, we concentrate both on another type of informant and of framework. Indeed, he studies the production of children suffering from Specific Language Impairment (SLI), a developmental language disorder the causes of which exclude cognitive impairment, psycho-emotional disturbance, and motor-articulatory disorders. Using the Leonard corpus in CLAN, Lin aims to test two competing accounts of SLI (the Agreement and Tense Omission Model [ATOM] and his own Phonetic Form Deficit Model [PFDM]) that conflicts on the role attributed to spellout in the impairment. Spellout is the point at which the Computational System for Human Language (CHL) passes over the most recently derived part of the derivation to the interface components, Phonetic Form (PF) and Logical Form (LF). ATOM claims that SLI sufferers have a deficit in their syntactic representation while PFDM suggests that the problem only occurs at the spellout level. After studying the corpus from the point of view of tense / agreement marking, case marking, argument-movement and auxiliary inversion, Lin finds further support for his model. Olga Gupol, Susan Rohstein and Sharon Armon-Lotem’s chapter offers a welcome bridge between child language acquisition and multilingualism. Their study explores the influence of intensive exposure to L2 Hebrew on the development of L1 Russian tense and aspect morphology through an elicited narrative. Their informants are 40 Russian-Hebrew sequential bilingual children distributed in two age groups 4;0 – 4;11 and 7;0 - 8;0. They come to the conclusion that bilingual children anchor their narratives in perfective like monolinguals. However, while aware of grammatical aspect, bilinguals lack the full form-function mapping and tend to overgeneralize the imperfective on the principles of simplicity (as imperfective are the least morphologically marked forms), universality (as it covers more functions) and interference. Rafael Salaberry opens the second section on foreign language learners. In his contribution, he reflects on the difficulty L2 learners of Spanish encounter when it comes to distinguishing between iterativity (conveyed with the use of the preterite) and habituality (expressed through the imperfect). He examines in turn the theoretical views that see, on the one hand, habituality as part of grammatical knowledge and iterativity as pragmatic knowledge, and on the other hand both habituality and iterativity as grammatical knowledge. He comes to the conclusion that the use of preterite as a default past tense marker may explain the impoverished system of aspectual distinctions, not only at beginners but also at advanced levels, which may indicate that the system is differentially represented among L1 and L2 speakers. Acquiring the vast array of functions conveyed by a form is therefore no mean feat, as confirmed by the next study. Based on the prototype theory, Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig’s chapter focuses on the development of the progressive in L2 English. It opens with an overview of the functions of the progressive in English. Then, a review of acquisition research on the progressive in English and other languages is provided. The bulk of the chapter reports on a longitudinal study of 16 learners of L2 English and shows how their use of the progressive expands from the prototypical uses of process and continuousness to the less prototypical uses of repetition and future. The study concludes that the progressive spreads in interlanguage in accordance with prototype accounts. However, it suggests additional stages, not predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis, in the development from activities and accomplishments at least for the meaning of repeatedness. A similar theoretical framework is adopted in the following chapter, but it deals with a lesser studied language. Hyun-Jin Kim revisits the claims of the Aspect Hypothesis in relation to the acquisition of L2 Korean by two L1 English learners. Inspired by studies on L2 Japanese, she focuses on the emergence and spread of the past / perfective marker ¬–ess- and the progressive – ko iss- in the interlanguage of her informants throughout their third and fourth semesters of study. The data collected through six sessions of conversational interviews and picture description tasks seem to support the Aspect Hypothesis. Indeed learners show a strong association between past tense and accomplishments / achievements at the start and a gradual extension to other types; a limited use of past / perfective marker with states and an affinity of progressive with activities / accomplishments and later achievements. In addition, - ko iss– moves from progressive to resultative in the specific category of Korean verbs meaning wear / carry. While the previous contributions focus on function, Evgeniya Sergeeva and Jean-Pierre Chevrot’s is interested in form. The authors explore the acquisition of verbal morphology in L2 French by 30 instructed native speakers of Russian distributed in a low and high levels. They use an elicitation task for verbs with different models of stem alternation and study how token frequency and base forms influence stem selection. The analysis shows that frequency affects correct production, especially among learners with high proficiency. As for substitution errors, it appears that forms with a simple structure are systematically more frequent than the target form they replace. When a complex form serves as a substitute, it is more frequent only when it is replacing another complex form. As regards the use of base forms, the 3rd person singular of the present – and to some extent the infinitive – play this role in the corpus. The authors therefore conclude that the processing of surface forms can be influenced positively or negatively by the frequency of the target forms and of other competing stems, and by the proximity of the target stem to a base form. Finally, Martin Howard’s contribution takes up the challenge of focusing on the poorer relation of the TAM system. On the basis of L2 French data obtained through sociolinguistic interviews, he studies the expression of futurity, conditional and subjunctive in three groups of university learners with classroom teaching only (two or three years of university teaching) or with a mixture of classroom teaching and naturalistic exposure (2 years at University + 1 year abroad). An analysis of relative frequencies leads him to suggest a continuum of use going from futurate present to conditional with past hypothetic conditional clauses in si, which needs to be confirmed by further studies. Acknowledgements The present volume was inspired by the conference Acquisition of Tense – Aspect – Mood in First and Second Language held on 9th and 10th February 2008 at Aston University (Birmingham, UK) where over 40 delegates from four continents and over a dozen countries met for lively and enjoyable discussions. This collection of papers was double peer-reviewed by an international scientific committee made of Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (Indiana University), Christine Bozier (Lund Universitet), Alex Housen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Martin Howard (University College Cork), Florence Myles (Newcastle University), Urszula Paprocka (Catholic University of Lublin), †Clive Perdue (Université Paris 8), Michel Pierrard (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Rafael Salaberry (University of Texas at Austin), Suzanne Schlyter (Lund Universitet), Richard Towell (Salford University), and Daniel Véronique (Université d’Aix-en-Provence). We are very much indebted to that scientific committee for their insightful input at each step of the project. We are also thankful for the financial support of the Association for French Language Studies through its workshop grant, and to the Aston Modern Languages Research Foundation for funding the proofreading of the manuscript.

“I didn’t mean to steal someone else’s words!”:a forensic linguistic approach to detecting intentional plagiarism

The concept of plagiarism is not uncommonly associated with the concept of intellectual property, both for historical and legal reasons: the approach to the ownership of ‘moral’, nonmaterial goods has evolved to the right to individual property, and consequently a need was raised to establish a legal framework to cope with the infringement of those rights. The solution to plagiarism therefore falls most often under two categories: ethical and legal. On the ethical side, education and intercultural studies have addressed plagiarism critically, not only as a means to improve academic ethics policies (PlagiarismAdvice.org, 2008), but mainly to demonstrate that if anything the concept of plagiarism is far from being universal (Howard & Robillard, 2008). Even if differently, Howard (1995) and Scollon (1994, 1995) argued, and Angèlil-Carter (2000) and Pecorari (2008) later emphasised that the concept of plagiarism cannot be studied on the grounds that one definition is clearly understandable by everyone. Scollon (1994, 1995), for example, claimed that authorship attribution is particularly a problem in non-native writing in English, and so did Pecorari (2008) in her comprehensive analysis of academic plagiarism. If among higher education students plagiarism is often a problem of literacy, with prior, conflicting social discourses that may interfere with academic discourse, as Angèlil-Carter (2000) demonstrates, we then have to aver that a distinction should be made between intentional and inadvertent plagiarism: plagiarism should be prosecuted when intentional, but if it is part of the learning process and results from the plagiarist’s unfamiliarity with the text or topic it should be considered ‘positive plagiarism’ (Howard, 1995: 796) and hence not an offense. Determining the intention behind the instances of plagiarism therefore determines the nature of the disciplinary action adopted. Unfortunately, in order to demonstrate the intention to deceive and charge students with accusations of plagiarism, teachers necessarily have to position themselves as ‘plagiarism police’, although it has been argued otherwise (Robillard, 2008). Practice demonstrates that in their daily activities teachers will find themselves being required a command of investigative skills and tools that they most often lack. We thus claim that the ‘intention to deceive’ cannot inevitably be dissociated from plagiarism as a legal issue, even if Garner (2009) asserts that generally plagiarism is immoral but not illegal, and Goldstein (2003) makes the same severance. However, these claims, and the claim that only cases of copyright infringement tend to go to court, have recently been challenged, mainly by forensic linguists, who have been actively involved in cases of plagiarism. Turell (2008), for instance, demonstrated that plagiarism is often connoted with an illegal appropriation of ideas. Previously, she (Turell, 2004) had demonstrated by comparison of four translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Spanish that the use of linguistic evidence is able to demonstrate instances of plagiarism. This challenge is also reinforced by practice in international organisations, such as the IEEE, to whom plagiarism potentially has ‘severe ethical and legal consequences’ (IEEE, 2006: 57). What plagiarism definitions used by publishers and organisations have in common – and which the academia usually lacks – is their focus on the legal nature. We speculate that this is due to the relation they intentionally establish with copyright laws, whereas in education the focus tends to shift from the legal to the ethical aspects. However, the number of plagiarism cases taken to court is very small, and jurisprudence is still being developed on the topic. In countries within the Civil Law tradition, Turell (2008) claims, (forensic) linguists are seldom called upon as expert witnesses in cases of plagiarism, either because plagiarists are rarely taken to court or because there is little tradition of accepting linguistic evidence. In spite of the investigative and evidential potential of forensic linguistics to demonstrate the plagiarist’s intention or otherwise, this potential is restricted by the ability to identify a text as being suspect of plagiarism. In an era with such a massive textual production, ‘policing’ plagiarism thus becomes an extraordinarily difficult task without the assistance of plagiarism detection systems. Although plagiarism detection has attracted the attention of computer engineers and software developers for years, a lot of research is still needed. Given the investigative nature of academic plagiarism, plagiarism detection has of necessity to consider not only concepts of education and computational linguistics, but also forensic linguistics. Especially, if intended to counter claims of being a ‘simplistic response’ (Robillard & Howard, 2008). In this paper, we use a corpus of essays written by university students who were accused of plagiarism, to demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of improper paraphrasing in suspect texts has the potential to identify and provide evidence of intention. A linguistic analysis of the corpus texts shows that the plagiarist acts on the paradigmatic axis to replace relevant lexical items with a related word from the same semantic field, i.e. a synonym, a subordinate, a superordinate, etc. In other words, relevant lexical items were replaced with related, but not identical, ones. Additionally, the analysis demonstrates that the word order is often changed intentionally to disguise the borrowing. On the other hand, the linguistic analysis of linking and explanatory verbs (i.e. referencing verbs) and prepositions shows that these have the potential to discriminate instances of ‘patchwriting’ and instances of plagiarism. This research demonstrates that the referencing verbs are borrowed from the original in an attempt to construct the new text cohesively when the plagiarism is inadvertent, and that the plagiarist has made an effort to prevent the reader from identifying the text as plagiarism, when it is intentional. In some of these cases, the referencing elements prove being able to identify direct quotations and thus ‘betray’ and denounce plagiarism. Finally, we demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of these verbs is critical to allow detection software to identify them as proper paraphrasing and not – mistakenly and simplistically – as plagiarism.

Aller et venir:des verbes de déplacement aux auxiliaires aspectuels-temporels-modaux

Après avoir décrit le fonctionnement des verbes aller et venir, nous développons l’hypothèse selon laquelle leur grammaticalisation en auxiliaires s’effectue sur la base de l’élément spatial qui structure tant leur sémantisme commun – le déplacement vers une destination – que leur différence : l’orientation déictique (venir) / non déictique (aller) du déplacement. Nous testons cette hypothèse en analysant les principaux emplois des périphrases de structure [aller / venir (+prép.) + V(infinitif, gérondif)]. After a description of how movement verbs aller and venir work, we develop an hypothesis according to which their grammaticalisation into auxiliaries relies on the spatial element that structures their shared semantics – movement towards a destination - as well as their distinctive feature : a deictic (venir) or non deictic (aller) orientation of the movement. We test that hypothesis against an analysis of the main uses of periphrases in the [aller / venir (+ prep.) + V(infinitive, present participle)] pattern.

Information Technologies for the Preservation of Language Heritage

In this paper we try to present how information technologies as tools for the creation of digital bilingual dictionaries can help the preservation of natural languages. Natural languages are an outstanding part of human cultural values and for that reason they should be preserved as part of the world cultural heritage. We describe our work on the bilingual lexical database supporting the Bulgarian-Polish Online dictionary. The main software tools for the web- presentation of the dictionary are shortly described. We focus our special attention on the presentation of verbs, the richest from a specific characteristics viewpoint linguistic category in Bulgarian.

A injunção em livros didáticos de língua portuguesa do 4º e 5º anos do ensino fundamental

This investigation aims at identifying, describing, analyzing and interpreting how textbooks on Portuguese Language approach, beginning with the linguistic material, the effects of sense in texts that predominately employ injunctives. The corpus of this study is comprised of six collections of textbooks on Portuguese Language, which are part of the National Program Guide for Textbooks (PNLD) from 2010, adopted by the public schools in the city of Natal and the object of study for the Read/Tell Project of the Educational Observatory of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). Textbooks from the 4th and 5th grades, Elementary School, were analyzed – 12 copies total. For the analysis, we selected 16 writing proposals of injunctive texts. Our study is based on theoretical discussions by Adam (2001a, 2001b) with regard to the genre of: inciting to action. In addition, we consider the work of Koch and Fávero (1987), Koch and Elias (2009), Marcuschi (2003, 2008) Pery-Woodly (2001), Rodrigues (2013), Travaglia (1992, 2007) and Rosa (2007). With respect to discussions on textbooks, we refer to Choppin (2004, 2009), Batista (2003, 2009), Rojo e Batista (2005), and with regard to Portuguese Language textbooks specifically, we consider Soares (1998, 2001, 2004) and Bunzen and Rojo (2005). The proposals for writing in injunctive texts, in the collections analyzed, are tips/recommendations, instructions on making toys and/or games, travel itineraries and cooking recipes, such that 69% of them appear in the 4 th grade textbooks and only 31% appear in the 5th grade textbooks. With respect to the linguistic elements responsible for the construction of directive speech acts and the effects on sense produced by them, the data shows that 50% of the writing proposals do not exploit linguistic categories that implicate the effects on sense using injunctives, or rather, there is no work done dealing with linguistic analysis, while 33% mention the imperative mode and 17% investigate infinitive verbs. In this dissertation, the textual plans of incitation to act genres were studied and in them the linguistic materiality that vehicles injunction. This study might contribute to the improvement of Portuguese language teaching in what concerns the articulation of grammatical studies to textual sequences/types, mainly in the case of Portuguese language textbooks for the 4th and 5th grades of Elementary School.

O /R/ em posição de coda silábica na cidade de Uberlândia

The aim of this research is to describe and analyze the realization of the /R/ at the end of the syllable (coda) in the city of Uberlândia-MG, taking into account variationist aspects and possible phonological phenomena that permeates the variable realization of this segment. We used the labovian variationist methodology, that gave us the needed support to investigate and systematize the variation of one linguistic community. The corpus was compound by 5139 occurrences of /R/, which 2528 were retroflex realizations, 2480 were deletions and 132 were occurrences of other segments. The informants of this research were stratified by: sex; age group; scholarly; they were born in Uberlândia or they arrived in this city before fifth birthday. Beyond the extralinguistic variables (sex, age group and scholarty), we established as linguistic variables: following context; previous context; tonicity of syllable; lexical item; coda position in the syllable; and, at last, the word size. After the statistic analisis computed by the Goldvarb software, the favoring contexts to the retroflex realization were: coronal segments in the following context; labial segments in the previous context; unstressed syllables; nouns and others (non verbs); and words with one syllable. The favoring contexts to deletion were: dorsal segments int the following context and verbs. The extra linguistic variables favored the variation less scholarty. So, the factors male sex and age group from 26 to 49 years favored the retroflex variant, while the factors female and the age group with more than 49 years favored the deletion.

A critical discourse analysis on the (self) representation of Hillary R. Clinton in public discourse

El rol de la mujer dentro de la sociedad ha sido y aún es un tema de mucha controversia. Incluso en nuestra sociedad, se suscitan debates sobre si les está permitido a las mujeres ocupar ciertos ámbitos laborales que han estado siempre dominados por una fuerte presencia masculina, como es el caso del ámbito político. Además, en muchos países aún ni siquiera están reconocidos los derechos de las mujeres, y mientras que, en otras culturas, a pesar de que la ley vela por los derechos humanos sin importar la raza, la religión o el género, la realidad es que incluso en las culturas más desarrolladas existe desigualdad de género y estereotipos que afectan el desenvolvimiento de la mujer. Sin embargo, a pesar de que aun la desigualdad de género está presente en la sociedad, es innegable que la situación actual es mucho más positiva para la implicación de las mujeres incluso dentro de ámbitos de la sociedad, que décadas atrás sería impensable, como la política. En esta línea, toda esta situación ha suscitado el interés de muchos investigadores y lingüistas, que han dedicado tiempo a investigaciones sobre las relaciones entre discurso y género, y sobre la representación mediática de mujeres que tienen cierta influencia en el ámbito público, y cómo la desigualdad de género afecta su imagen pública. Si bien es cierto, durante mucho tiempo el ámbito de la política ha estado dominado por presencia masculina, ahora la situación ha cambiado. En las últimas décadas, se ha hecho evidente una gran presencia de mujeres dentro de la política, mujeres que a comparación de la situación vivida décadas atrás, ahora tienen la posibilidad de presentarse incluso como candidatas a la presidencia, como es el caso de Hillary Clinton. En este sentido muchas corrientes feministas han contribuido en gran medida a esta nueva situación. Ahora bien, en vista de toda esta situación, el presente estudio de investigación intentará dar respuesta a las siguientes preguntas. ¿Hasta qué punto los estereotipos de género están aún presentes en la sociedad? ¿La representación mediática de una figura política está realmente basada en su conducta y en su actividad discursiva, o está influida por esquemas e ideas preconcebidas de género? Teniendo en cuenta que hoy en día hay una mayor presencia femenina dentro del ámbito político, una de mis hipótesis iniciales es que la situación de los estereotipos de género ha disminuido. Además, se espera que la forma en la que Hillary Clinton se representa a sí misma como una mujer y como una política esté menos perjudicada por estos esquemas. El objetivo de este estudio es, primeramente, llevar a cabo un análisis sobre diez discursos de Hillary Clinton, desde el 15 de junio de 2015, fecha en la que Hillary Clinton lanzo su candidatura a la presidencia, hasta el 26 de abril de 2016, para a través de este análisis poder identificar como Hillary Clinton se caracteriza a sí misma en sus discursos políticos, y asimismo identificar si los esquemas convencionales sobre género afectan su auto representación. Con este objetivo, el enfoque de este estudio se va a centrar en análisis cuantitativos y cualitativos sobre la frecuencia de palabras, seguido de un análisis crítico del discurso sobre la auto representación de Hillary en sus discursos. Además, siguiendo la línea de investigación de Tannen (1996), se realizará un análisis sobre los usos de los pronombres “nosotros” y “yo”, para adquirir una mayor perspectiva sobre esta situación. Seguidamente, teniendo en cuenta que los medios de comunicación reflejan ideologías sociales, este estudio ha sido también diseñado para analizar diez artículos de noticias sobre los discursos previamente analizados de Hillary Clinton. De esta manera, se examinará si los estereotipos de género están presentes en la representación mediática de Hillary Clinton, para seguidamente analizar si la interpretación mediática de la candidata a la presidencia está realmente relacionada con los discursos analizados o, si por lo contrario están influidos por estereotipos y esquemas de género. Para cumplir con este objetivo, los datos recopilados para este corpus consisten en exactamente diez artículos que reporten sobre los discursos estudiados en el primer análisis, y la actuación de Hillary Clinton. Estos artículos fueron recogidos de cuatro de los periódicos más importantes de los Estados Unidos, que son New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles times y The Washington Post. En este caso el análisis estará centrado en la frecuencia de palabras y en el uso de reporting verbs, siguiendo la línea de investigación de Caldas – Coulthard (1995). Se espera que el presente estudio pueda servir para mayores investigaciones sobre cuestiones de género, y de esta manera contribuir a la creación de teorías que puedan explicar mejor la situación de las mujeres dentro de la política. Para finalizar, aún queda mucho que investigar en esta disciplina, e incluso más por descubrir