Linguistic imperialism : a study of language and yoruba rituals in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the king’s horseman

L’objectif de ce mémoire est de démontrer le rôle important de la langue dans la pièce de théâtre Death and the King’s Horseman par l’auteur nigérian Wole Soyinka. Le premier chapitre traite les implications de l'écriture d'un texte postcolonial dans la langue anglaise et revisite les débats linguistiques des années 1950 et 1960. En plus de l'anglais, ce mémoire observe l'utilisation d'autres formes de communication telles que l'anglais, le pidgin nigérian, les dialectes locaux et les métaphores Yoruba. Par conséquent, l'intersection entre la langue et la culture devient évidente à travers la description des rituels. La dernière partie de ce mémoire explore l'objectif principal de Soyinka de créer une «essence thrénodique». Avec l'utilisation de masques rituels, de la danse et de la musique, il développe un type de dialogue qui dépasse les limites de la forme écrite et est accessible seulement à ceux qui sont équipés de sensibilités culturelles Yoruba.

Language plurality as power struggle, or: Translating politics in Canada

For this paper, heterolingualism or language plurality will be considered as the presence in a single text or in a social environment of both French and English, Canada’s official languages. Language plurality will here be studied from an institutional viewpoint: the influence of the Canadian government on the translation of political speeches. The first part of this article will establish that political speeches are written in a bilingual environment where the two official languages are often in contact. This bilingualism, however, is often homogenised when it comes to speech delivery and publication. Therefore, the second part focuses on the speeches’ paratextual

Design and Development of an Adaptable Frame -Based System for Dravidian Language Processing

This work is aimed at building an adaptable frame-based system for processing Dravidian languages. There are about 17 languages in this family and they are spoken by the people of South India.Karaka relations are one of the most important features of Indian languages. They are the semabtuco-syntactic relations between verbs and other related constituents in a sentence. The karaka relations and surface case endings are analyzed for meaning extraction. This approach is comparable with the borad class of case based grammars.The efficiency of this approach is put into test in two applications. One is machine translation and the other is a natural language interface (NLI) for information retrieval from databases. The system mainly consists of a morphological analyzer, local word grouper, a parser for the source language and a sentence generator for the target language. This work make contributios like, it gives an elegant account of the relation between vibhakthi and karaka roles in Dravidian languages. This mapping is elegant and compact. The same basic thing also explains simple and complex sentence in these languages. This suggests that the solution is not just ad hoc but has a deeper underlying unity. This methodology could be extended to other free word order languages. Since the frame designed for meaning representation is general, they are adaptable to other languages coming in this group and to other applications.

Farm Programmes of Electronic Media: A Comparative Study of Audience Perception in Kerala

Farm communication and extension programs are vital part of the farm development attempts. Electronic media plays a major role in farm extension activities. Kerala, the consumer state, which was a complete agricultural state in pre-independence period, is the sprouting land of agricultural extension and publication activities in print media. Later AIR (All India Radio) farm programs and farm broadcasting of Doordarshan enriched the role of electronic media in farm extension activities. The media saturated southern state of India received this new electronic media farm communication revolution whole heartedly. However, after 1990, Kerala witnessed a flood of private T V channels and currently there are 24 channels in this regional language, named Malayalam. All major news and entertainment channels are broadcasting farm programs. Farm programs of AIR and Doordarshan, broadcasted in Malayalam language, have been well accepted to the farmers‘ in Kerala. However, post-independence period, witnessed the formation of Kerala state in Indian Union and the first ballot-elected communist Government started its administration. After the land reform bills, the state witnessed a gradual decrease in agricultural production. Even if it is not reflected much in the attitude and practices of farm community and farm broadcast of traditional electronic broadcasting, a change is observable after the post-liberalization era of India. Private Television channels, which were focused on entertainment value of programs, started broadcasting farm programs and the parameters of program production went through certain changes. In this situation, there is ample relevance for a study about the farm programs of electronic media in terms of a comparative study of audience perception. The study is limited in the state of Kerala as it is the most media saturated state in India. The study analyzes the rate, nature and scope of adoption of farming methods transmitted through electronic media (T.V. and Radio) in Malayalam language.All kinds of Farm programs including comprehensive program serials, success stories, seasonal cropping methods, experts opinion, been analyzed on the basis of the following objectives.  To find whether propagating new farm methods through farm programs in electronic media or the availability of adequate infrastructure and economic factors make a farmer to adopt a new farming method.  To find which electronic media has more influence on farmers to adopt agricultural programs.  To find which form of electronic media gets better feedback from farmers  To find out whether the programs of T.V. or Radio is more acceptable to farmers than the print media.  To find whether farmers gets the message through their preferred medium for the message. The researcher recorded opinions from a panel of agricultural officers, farm Information officers, agro extension researchers and experts. According to their opinions and guidelines, a pilot study is designed and conducted in Kanjikuzhy Panchayath, in Alappuzha district, Kerala. The Panchayath is selected by considering its ideal nature of being the sample for a social Science research. Besides, the nature of farming in the Panchayath, which devoid of the cultivation of cash crops also supported its sample value. As per the observations from the pilot study, researcher confirmed the Triangulation method as the methodology of research. The questionnaire survey, being the primary part contained 42 Questions with 6 independent and 32 dependent variables. The survey is conducted among 400 respondents in Idukki, Alappuzha and Pathanamthitta districts considering geographical differences and distribution of different types of crops. The response from a total of 360 respondents, 120 from each district, finally selected for tabulation and data analysis.The data analysis, based on percentage analysis, along with the results from focus group discussion among a selected group of 20 farmers, together produced the results as follows. Farmers, who are the audience of farm programs, have a very serious approach towards the medium. They are maintaining a critical point of view towards the content of the programs. Farmers are reasonably aware about the financial side of the programs and the monitory aspirations of both private and Government owned Television channels. Even though, the farmers are not aware on the technical terminology and jargons, they have ideas about success stories, program serials and they are even informed about channels are not maintaining an audience research section like AIR. Though the farmers accept Doordarshan as the credential source of farm information and methods, they are inclined to the entertainment value of programs too. They prefer to have more entertainment value for the programs of Doordarshan. Surprisingly, they have very solid suggestions on even about the shots which add entertainment value to the farm broadcasting methods of Doordarshan. Farmers are very much aware about the fact that media is just an instrument for inspiration and persuasion. They strongly believe that the source of information and new methods is agricultural research and an effective change happens only when there are adequate infrastructure and marketing facilities, along with the proper support from Government agricultural guideline and support systems like Krishi Bhavans. They strongly believe that media alone cannot create any magic in increasing agricultural production. Farmers are pointing out the lack of response to the feedback and queries of farmers on farming methods, as an evidence for the difference in levels of commitment of Government and private owned Television channels.Farmers are still perceiving AIR farm programs are far more committed to farmers and farming than any other electronic medium. However, they are seriously lacking Radio receivers with medium wave reception facility. Farmers perceive that the farming methods on new crops are more adoptable than the farming methods of traditional crops in both private and Government owned Television channels. There are multiple factors behind this observation from farmers. Farmers changed in terms of viewing habits and they prefer success stories, which are totally irrelevant and they even think that such stories encourage people to go for farming and they opined that such stories are good sources of inspiration. However, they are all very much sure about the importance and particular about the presence of entertainment factor even in farm programs. Farmers expect direct interaction of any expert of the new farming method to implement the method in their agriculture practices. Though introduction of a new idea in the T.V. is acceptable, farmers need the direct instruction of expert on field to start implementing the new farming practices Farmers still have an affinity towards print media reports and agricultural pages and they have complaints to print media on the removal of agricultural information pages from news papers. They prefer the reports in print media as it facilitates them to collect and refer articles when they need it. Farmers are having an eye of doubt about the credibility of farm programs by private T.V. channels. Even if they prefer private Television channels for listening and adopting new farming methods and other farm information, they scrutinize programs to know whether they are sponsored programs by agrochemical or agro-fertilizer manufacturer.

Design And Development Of A Named Entity Based Question Answering System For Malayalam Language

This is a Named Entity Based Question Answering System for Malayalam Language. Although a vast amount of information is available today in digital form, no effective information access mechanism exists to provide humans with convenient information access. Information Retrieval and Question Answering systems are the two mechanisms available now for information access. Information systems typically return a long list of documents in response to a user’s query which are to be skimmed by the user to determine whether they contain an answer. But a Question Answering System allows the user to state his/her information need as a natural language question and receives most appropriate answer in a word or a sentence or a paragraph. This system is based on Named Entity Tagging and Question Classification. Document tagging extracts useful information from the documents which will be used in finding the answer to the question. Question Classification extracts useful information from the question to determine the type of the question and the way in which the question is to be answered. Various Machine Learning methods are used to tag the documents. Rule-Based Approach is used for Question Classification. Malayalam belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is one of the four major languages of this family. It is one of the 22 Scheduled Languages of India with official language status in the state of Kerala. It is spoken by 40 million people. Malayalam is a morphologically rich agglutinative language and relatively of free word order. Also Malayalam has a productive morphology that allows the creation of complex words which are often highly ambiguous. Document tagging tools such as Parts-of-Speech Tagger, Phrase Chunker, Named Entity Tagger, and Compound Word Splitter are developed as a part of this research work. No such tools were available for Malayalam language. Finite State Transducer, High Order Conditional Random Field, Artificial Immunity System Principles, and Support Vector Machines are the techniques used for the design of these document preprocessing tools. This research work describes how the Named Entity is used to represent the documents. Single sentence questions are used to test the system. Overall Precision and Recall obtained are 88.5% and 85.9% respectively. This work can be extended in several directions. The coverage of non-factoid questions can be increased and also it can be extended to include open domain applications. Reference Resolution and Word Sense Disambiguation techniques are suggested as the future enhancements

Automated Transcription System for Malayalam Language

Malayalam is one of the 22 scheduled languages in India with more than 130 million speakers. This paper presents a report on the development of a speaker independent, continuous transcription system for Malayalam. The system employs Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for acoustic modeling and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) for feature extraction. It is trained with 21 male and female speakers in the age group ranging from 20 to 40 years. The system obtained a word recognition accuracy of 87.4% and a sentence recognition accuracy of 84%, when tested with a set of continuous speech data.

Connected digit speech recognition system for Malayalam language

A connected digit speech recognition is important in many applications such as automated banking system, catalogue-dialing, automatic data entry, automated banking system, etc. This paper presents an optimum speaker-independent connected digit recognizer forMalayalam language. The system employs Perceptual Linear Predictive (PLP) cepstral coefficient for speech parameterization and continuous density Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in the recognition process. Viterbi algorithm is used for decoding. The training data base has the utterance of 21 speakers from the age group of 20 to 40 years and the sound is recorded in the normal office environment where each speaker is asked to read 20 set of continuous digits. The system obtained an accuracy of 99.5 % with the unseen data.

The Effect of SIFT Features as Content Descriptors in the Context of Automatic Writer Identification in Malayalam Language

The span of writer identification extends to broad domes like digital rights administration, forensic expert decisionmaking systems, and document analysis systems and so on. As the success rate of a writer identification scheme is highly dependent on the features extracted from the documents, the phase of feature extraction and therefore selection is highly significant for writer identification schemes. In this paper, the writer identification in Malayalam language is sought for by utilizing feature extraction technique such as Scale Invariant Features Transform (SIFT).The schemes are tested on a test bed of 280 writers and performance evaluated

Literatur und Intertextualität

Als Intertextualität bezeichnet men die Interferenz und Interdependenz literarischer Texte und das daraus entstehende kommunikative Potential. Der ursprünglich von Kristeva stammende Begriff geht auf die Erkentnis zurück, dass Texte nicht in einem Vakuum entstehen und existieren, sondern immer sie beeinflussende Vorläufer haben, wie sie auch selbst spätere Texte beeinflussen. Dabei ist das Erkennen und Entwickeln von Intertextualitäten nicht allein auf den Verfasser beschränkt, sondern gehört auch zu den konstruktivistischen Tätigkeiten eines aufmerksamen Lesepublikums. In diesem Aufsatz werden drei Typen von Intertextualität unterschieden: Gattungs-Intertextualität, Archäologische Intertextualität und Schöpfungs-Intertextualität. Unter Gattungs-Intertextualität fasst man Texte mit gleichen Grundstrukturen, Erzählmustern und Motiven zusammen. Der Begriff Gattung meint dabei nicht die großen Gattungen wie Roman oder Short Story, sondern Untergattungen wie Utopien oder Robinsonaden, die hier beispielhaft diskutiert werden. Archäologische Intertextualität entstammt der Theorie Foucaults und entspricht dem Palimpsest-Begriff Genettes, nach dem eine oft wesentlich ältere Vorlage in einem Text als Hintergrund erkennbar wird. Als schöpferische Intertextualität wird die Entwicklung neuer, experimenteller Texte zur Autorenproduktivität aus gemachten Leseerfahrungen bezeichnet. Eine wichtige, im Text verwendete, Metapher ist die des Eisbergs, zu deren Erläuterung am Ende des Textes eine erläuternde Grafik angehängt ist.

Zur Anwendung der Feldergrammatik auf die gesprochene Sprache am Beispiel des Feldes der Temporalität

Der vorliegende Beitrag führt Möglichkeiten der Anwendung der Feldergrammatik auf die gesprochene Sprache am Beispiel des Feldes der Temporalität vor. Damit soll ein möglicher weiterer Theoriebaustein in die aktuelle Diskussion um eine Theorie der Grammatik der gesprochenen Sprache eingebracht werden.

Thesen zur Erforschung historischer Nähesprachlichkeit

In 7 Thesen werden grundsätzliche Überlegungen zu Möglichkeiten und Perspektiven der Erforschung historischer Nähesprachlichkeit vorgestellt. Die Thesen betreffen u.a. die Unterscheidung von historischer und universaler Nähesprachlichkeit sowie die Konsequenzen für Sprachgeschichts- und Gesprochene-Sprache-Forschung.

Grammatik der gesprochenen Sprache in Theorie und Praxis

Die vorliegende Arbeit gliedert sich in die aktuelle Diskussion um eine grammatiktheoretische Verortung der gesprochenen Sprache ein. Zentrale These der Arbeit ist, dass eine Theorie der Grammatik der gesprochenen Sprache komplexen Anforderungen genügen muss, die nur durch eine Modellierung mehrerer interagierender Theoriebausteine bewältigt werden können. Im theoretischen Teil der Arbeit werden zwei solcher Theoriebausteine vorgestellt, die einen ersten Schritt auf dem Weg zu einem Gesamtbild der Theorie der Grammatik der gesprochenen Sprache darstellen sollen. Die theoretischen Überlegungen werden im praktischen Teil der Arbeit auf die viel diskutierte Frage der grammatischen Einheitenbildung gesprochener Sprache angewendet.

Selbstverlag im literarischen Leben des Exils in den Jahren 1933-1945

Die Autoren, die Deutschland während der Herrschaft der Nationalsozialisten verlassen mussten, konnten nicht mehr bei einem etablierten Verlag in Deutschland veröffentlichen. Es war für viele Autoren schwer, ihre Manuskripte in einem Verlag im Exil zu veröffentlichen. Eine Reihe von ihnen entschloss sich daher, ihre literarischen Werke in den jeweiligen Exilländern selbst zu publizieren. Sogar bekannte Autoren wie Oskar Maria Graf, Else Lasker-Schüler, Hans Marchwitza und Paul Zech fungierten als Selbstverleger. Nach den Angaben der Deutschen Bibliothek existierten in den Jahren zwischen 1933 und 1945 siebzig Exilselbstverlage. Die Werke aus den Exilselbstverlagen blieben in der Öffentlichkeit weitgehend unbekannt und auch literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen widmeten sich ihnen bisher kaum. Die Bedeutung des Wortes Selbstverlag lässt sich definieren als ’Veröffentlichung durch sich selbst‘. Damit ist eine grundlegende Eigenschaft festgelegt: Im Selbstverlag erfolgt die Produktion und Verbreitung eines Werkes durch den Autor persönlich. Die Gruppe der Selbstverleger setzte sich während des Exils aus Berufen wie Graphiker, Journalisten, Künstler, Militärberater, Parteifunktionäre, Pädagogen, Philosophen, Politiker, Professoren, Psychologen, Publizisten, Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler zusammen. Vor allem in Europa erreichte im Jahr 1935 die Zahl der Selbstverlage mit elf einen Höchststand. Nach dem Ende des zweiten Weltkrieges im Jahre 1945 sank ihre Anzahl auffallend stark auf drei. In den USA, Israel und Südamerika entstanden in den Jahren 1939 bis 1945 neue Selbstverlage. Insgesamt existierten sie in 15 Ländern. Das Hauptmerkmal der Selbstverlage ist eine direkte Beziehung zwischen Autor und Leser. Die Leserschaft der Selbstverlage war auf einen kleinen Kreis von Freunden, Bekannten und Verwandten reduziert. Während des Exils wurden insgesamt 105 Werke in Selbstverlagen veröffentlicht. Dort wurden 32 Gedichtsbände, 9 Erzählungen und 5 Dramen publiziert. Insgesamt gesehen stellte die Selbstveröffentlichung der Exilautoren eine besondere Form des literarischen Lebens im Exil dar.

Total differential scattering cross section of {Ar^+}-Ar at 15 to 400 keV

We report on the measurement of the total differential scattering cross section of {Ar^+}-Ar at laboratory energies between 15 and 400 keV. Using an ab initio relativistic molecular program which calculates the interatomic potential energy curve with high accuracy, we are able to reproduce the detailed structure found in the experiment.

A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents

Cooperative behaviour of agents within highly dynamic and nondeterministic domains is an active field of research. In particular establishing highly responsive teamwork, where agents are able to react on dynamic changes in the environment while facing unreliable communication and sensory noise, is an open problem. Moreover, modelling such responsive, cooperative behaviour is difficult. In this work, we specify a novel model for cooperative behaviour geared towards highly dynamic domains. In our approach, agents estimate each other’s decision and correct these estimations once they receive contradictory information. We aim at a comprehensive approach for agent teamwork featuring intuitive modelling capabilities for multi-agent activities, abstractions over activities and agents, and a clear operational semantic for the new model. This work encompasses a complete specification of the new language, ALICA.