Negotiating topic changes:native and non-native speakers of English in conversation

There is a tendency to view conversations involving non-native speakers (NNSs) as inevitably fraught with problems, including an inability to handle topic management. This article, in contrast, will focus on effective topic changes made by non-native speakers during informal conversations with native speakers of English. A micro-analysis of ten conversations revealed several ways of shifting conversational topics; however, the article concentrates on those strategies which the participants used to effect a particular type of topic move, namely 'marked topic changes', where there is no connection at all with previous talk. The findings show how these topic changes were jointly negotiated, and that the non-native speakers' contributions to initiating new topics were competently managed.

Alberto Girri, or poetry as hermeneutic reason

One of the main factors that makes the poetry of the Argentine Alberto Girri (1919–1991) a whole world of its own is my argument that in a fragmentary world like the present, poets search for a formal integrity which in the act of reading creates not only their own inner world but also the readers'. It is important to insist on this turning point in which most of the Symbolist work is circumscribed. Later, this would be of capital importance for the avant-garde as well as for the post-avant-garde: Mallarmé's Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard would make poetry something absolutely modern. An original distribution of the white and black opened a new space for the text, shifting the then dominant phonocentrism. My close reading of this author as well as the given theoretical frame avoids the failure into an instrumental use either of the page or of the writing but ignoring physical reciprocity. What follows is, that this “shift” privileged heightened vision over audition of the “musical score”. Thus, an intense materialization of the language is achieved that increases the anonymity of the text. ^ Following this new arrangement of words, so to speak, Girri's poetic work now drives deeply inside words in order to lend them dignity from meaning. I conclude that the best way to “render” this poetry with religious aim (L. “re-ligare” to bind the fragmented) is by way of the philosophy of language. I also propose that Girri's task as a translator, mainly from English poetry, represented—with Jorge Luis Borges—a paradigmatic shift in the Spanish American horizon which had been under “logocentric” French rule since the time of Independence. This seismic change of perspective in late Modernism and post-Modernism is represented by a radical screening of Romance rhetoric, it was a shift not only over the inherited mother tongue but over his own work which was increasingly moving towards transcendent and/or metaphysical poetry. ^ Therefore, I did find that Girri's poem was constructed as a mirror closely related to that which was represented in the angelological tradition. ^

Women defending themselves: Cuban Romantic feminine voices (poetry and short stories)

Throughout history, women have played an important role in literature. Nevertheless, since Sappho's poetry until now, feminine voices have had to struggle for recognition of their works. ^ Before the nineteenth century, women were almost ignored in Spanish literature. Society kept them as “ángeles de la familia,” taking care of their homes, husbands, and children. Some of them, such as María de Zayas y Sotomayor in Spain and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, complained about their situation in their writings. However, they expressed their fight not as a generation but as individuals. ^ In the nineteenth century, the ideas and ideals of Romanticism, were brought to Latin America from Europe. Cuba was among those countries where the new movement took roots. Initiated by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a group of women began to participate in literary reunions, and to found newspapers and magazines where works authored by women, dedicated to feminist ideas, were published. They indeed through literature started to live out womanhood in order to intellectually leave the ideological prisons where society had been keeping them. ^ This study scans the literary works of all Romantic women writers in Cuba. It specifically analyzes poetry and short stories, and investigates how these authors expressed themselves in their works against the patriarchal society, where they lived and wrote their books. An eclectic critical method has been used. ^ Findings were very revealing. Only three of the fourteen writers studied in my dissertation had been previously mentioned by major critics. Most of them had been ignored. However, the greatest discovery was that they prompted something new: For the first time they projected themselves as a group, as a collective consciousness, and this fact established a difference with former women writers in Cuban literature before Romanticism. In other words, they produced a “Renaissance” in Cuba's literature. In spite of how they lived between 1820 and 1900, their struggles for women's rights have linked them to our current times. ^

The Cuban Poetry of Alfonso Camín, Father of Afro-Cuban Poetry : Lecture by Victor Puertodan

This flyer promotes the event "The Cuban Poetry of Alfonso Camín, Father of Afro-Cuban Poetry : Lecture by Victor Puertodan" cosponsored by the FlU Initiative for Spanish and Mediterranean Studies.

Virgilio Piñera: Poetry, Nation, and Differences, Book Presentation by Author Jesús E. Jambrina

This flyer promotes the event "Virgilio Piñera: Poetry, Nation, and Differences, Book Presentation by Author Jesús E. Jambrina" and is part of the SIPA at Books & Books series. Hosted at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

Sentiment-Topic Modelling in Text Mining

Peer reviewed

Sentiment-Topic Modelling in Text Mining

Peer reviewed

A Curated Corpus for Sentiment-Topic Analysis

Postprint

Sentiment-Topic Modelling in Text Mining

Peer reviewed

Constructing desire : Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman and the development of homoerotic desire in elegiac poetry

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Constructing desire : Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman and the development of homoerotic desire in elegiac poetry

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

LDA-TM : A two-step approach to twitter topic data clustering

The Twitter System is the biggest social network in the world, and everyday millions of tweets are posted and talked about, expressing various views and opinions. A large variety of research activities have been conducted to study how the opinions can be clustered and analyzed, so that some tendencies can be uncovered. Due to the inherent weaknesses of the tweets - very short texts and very informal styles of writing - it is rather hard to make an investigation of tweet data analysis giving results with good performance and accuracy. In this paper, we intend to attack the problem from another aspect - using a two-layer structure to analyze the twitter data: LDA with topic map modelling. The experimental results demonstrate that this approach shows a progress in twitter data analysis. However, more experiments with this method are expected in order to ensure that the accurate analytic results can be maintained.