The use of the pronouns we, us, and our in political speeches : A comparative study of the inaugural addresses of Bush and Obama

Pronouns carry considerable importance in language. The speaker’s identity and connection to the audience emerges through the consistent use of certain pronouns (De Fina, 1995). This research is about the use of we, us, and our in political discourse. Specifically, their use will be examined in the inaugural addresses of George W. Bush in 2005 and Barack Obama in 2009. The aim of this research is to examine the frequencies and the co-occurrences of these pronouns and then compare their use in these two speeches. More specifically, how do the pronouns examined affect the message and enhance hearer credibility. This is done by applying (a) a quantitative corpus linguistics analysis and (b) qualitative analysis of the context of use. The results show that there is a difference in frequency of pronoun use; however, the usage of pronouns is rather similar in the two speeches

Australian political discourse: Pronominal choice in campaign speeches

The intention behind language used by candidates during an election campaign is to persuade voters to vote for a particular political party. Fundamental to the political arena is construction of identity, group membership and ways of talking about self, others, and the polarizing categories of 'us' and 'them'. This paper will investigate the pragmatics of pronominal choice and the way in which politicians construct and convey their own identities and those of their political opponents within political speeches. Taking six speeches by John Howard and Mark Latham across the course of the 2004 federal election campaign, I look at the ways in which pronominal choice indicates a shifting scope of reference to creat pragmatic effects and serve political functions.

Pronoun-dropping or zero anaphora in translation from german into portuguese

In this article I will analyse anaphoric references in German texts and their transaltion into Portuguese. I will take as main corpus Heinrich Böll's novel Haus ohne Hüter and its translation into Portuguese by Jorge Rosa with the title Casa Indefesa. I will concentrate on the use of personal pronouns and possessives in references to both people and objects in source text and target text and I will present patterns of symmetries and asymmetries. I will claim that asymmetries in the translation of such anaphoric references can be accounted for mainly by differences in the pronominal systems and verbal systems of both languages and by differences in the way each language marks theme/topic continuity/discontinuity in discourse. Issues related to style and the translation of anaphors will also be addressed. I will finally raise some questions related to ambiguous references which can not be solved within the scope of syntax or semantics, thus requiring pragmatic interpretation based on cultural knowledge/world knowledge.

Pronominal and anaphoric reference in agrammatism

Subjects with Broca's aphasia have been shown to display difficulties in on-line and off-line tasks involving personal pronouns and reflexives. Off-line tasks have indicated more errors with pronouns than with reflexives while the reverse has been found in on-line studies. In the present off-line study, the comprehension of sentences containing personal pronouns and reflexives is examined in a group of 10 agrammatic participants. Results indicate that subjects had difficulties with both pronouns and reflexives, particularly with reflexives in sentences that contained a quantificational antecedent, as well as with pronouns in exceptional case marking constructions. It is argued that the low performance that subjects exhibited as a group in pronouns and reflexives indicates two distinct impairments, one that concerns coreference and one that concerns A-dependencies, the latter being a manifestation of a general processing failure to link positions. Poor performance on exceptional case marking constructions compared to simple transitive sentences is claimed to be interpreted within theories for reference assignment that distinguish between the two sentence types. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Variação, mudança e ensino: o caso dos pronomes possessivos da gente e nosso(a)(s) em uma abordagem sociofuncionalista

In this work, we analyze the variation and change phenomenon involving the possessive pronouns da gente and nosso(a)(s) in the light of the theoretical referentials of the North-american linguistic functionalism and of the variationist sociolinguistics. At first we present the phenomenon itself, highlighting the fact that few studies have considered it as an object, gap which we will try to fill in with our contribution. In the following chapter, we emphasize concepts and principles of the functionalism and the sociolinguistics that are used as our background for the data analysis. In the third chapter, we present what the normative grammars inform about our object of study, besides synthesizing some works on variation and change involving the personal pronouns nós and a gente. In the following chapter, we analyze the data. We used data from the Discurso & Gramática a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998) corpus. In this chapter we present the results for the groups of social and linguistic factors which we can control. Grounded on these results, we specify the preferential contexts for employing the pronouns da gente and nosso(a)(s) and we observe that the social motivations, the valorization credited to the forms and the identity marks underly the restrictions exercised in their use by social factor groups, besides obtaining signs of ongoing changes in apparent time (from the age factor groups) and possible use specializations of each form, what helped us verify the course of the grammaticalization process of the referred pronouns in the community of Natal. In the sixth chapter, we make some considerations on the teaching of grammar and propose activities which can be carried on in the classroom involving the possessive pronouns da gente and nosso(a)(s) considering the variation and change issue

A implementação do você em cartas pessoais norte-riograndenses do século XX

Considering the theoretical and methodological presuppositions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (cf. WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 2006; LABOV, [1972] 2008), in this dissertation, we describe and analyze the process of variation/change involving the personal pronouns tu and você, and its extension in the pronominal paradigm in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), in three sets of personal letters written by people from Rio Grande do Norte (RN) along the 20th century. The discursive universe of those letters is news from the cities in which the informers lived and the themes from their everyday life (trade, jobs, trips, family and politics). Part of the analyzed letters integrate the written by hand minimum corpus of the Projeto de História do Português Brasileiro no Rio Grande do Norte (PHPB-RN). We are based on previous studies about the pronominal system in BP Menon (1995), Faraco (1996), Lopes e Machado (2005), Rumeu (2008), Lopes (2009), Lopes, Rumeu e Marcotulio (2011), Lopes e Marcotulio (2011) e Martins e Moura (2012) , which register the form você replaces tu from the end of the first half of 20th century and attest the following situation: while (a) the imperative verbal forms, (b) the explicit subjects and (c) prepositional complement pronouns are favorable contexts for você, the (d) non imperative verbal forms (with null subject), (e) the non prepositional complement pronoun and (f) the possessive pronoun are contexts of resistance of tu. The results got in this dissertation confirm, partially, the statements defended by the previous studies regarding the favorable contexts for the implementation of você in BP: (i) there are, in the letters from the first two decades of 20th century (1916 to 1925), high frequency of the usage of the form você (98%); (ii) in the personal letters of RN especially in the love letters, in which there are higher recurrence of intimate subjects the discursive universe proved to be itself very relevant in the determination/conditions of the forms of tu; (iii) the unique feminine informer of our sample uses, almost categorically, the forms of tu in letters of the period from 1946 to 1972; (iv) the letters corresponding to the period from 1992 to 1994 present a significant usage of the forms associated to the innovating você, letting appear the change is already implemented in the system of BP and there are, in that set of letters, strong evidences that make us state the pronominal forms of non prepositional complement (accusative/ dative) related to tu are also implemented in a system with an almost categorical usage of você

Referência e code-switching: traços de singularidade na linguagem de uma criança bilíngue

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Métrica y orden de palabras en griego antiguo : la cuestión del segundo argumento

A pesar de la ausencia de hablantes nativos, el griego cuenta con fuentes secundarias que permiten estudiar su estructura prosódica. En este artículo combino el estudio del orden de palabras y de la métrica de los trímetros yámbicos con el objetivo de ver cuál es la relación entre el verbo y el segundo argumento en términos de posición en la oración y de prosodia. Se mostrará que hay una tendencia a que el segundo argumento aparezca junto al verbo y a que formen parte de una única unidad prosódica. La tendencia es mayor con pronombres personales que con sintagmas nominales, que pueden aparecer separados si son complejos y extensos.

Método para la Construcción Automática de Ontologías Basado en Patrones Lingüísticos

La tesis que se presenta tiene como propósito la construcción automática de ontologías a partir de textos, enmarcándose en el área denominada Ontology Learning. Esta disciplina tiene como objetivo automatizar la elaboración de modelos de dominio a partir de fuentes información estructurada o no estructurada, y tuvo su origen con el comienzo del milenio, a raíz del crecimiento exponencial del volumen de información accesible en Internet. Debido a que la mayoría de información se presenta en la web en forma de texto, el aprendizaje automático de ontologías se ha centrado en el análisis de este tipo de fuente, nutriéndose a lo largo de los años de técnicas muy diversas provenientes de áreas como la Recuperación de Información, Extracción de Información, Sumarización y, en general, de áreas relacionadas con el procesamiento del lenguaje natural. La principal contribución de esta tesis consiste en que, a diferencia de la mayoría de las técnicas actuales, el método que se propone no analiza la estructura sintáctica superficial del lenguaje, sino que estudia su nivel semántico profundo. Su objetivo, por tanto, es tratar de deducir el modelo del dominio a partir de la forma con la que se articulan los significados de las oraciones en lenguaje natural. Debido a que el nivel semántico profundo es independiente de la lengua, el método permitirá operar en escenarios multilingües, en los que es necesario combinar información proveniente de textos en diferentes idiomas. Para acceder a este nivel del lenguaje, el método utiliza el modelo de las interlinguas. Estos formalismos, provenientes del área de la traducción automática, permiten representar el significado de las oraciones de forma independiente de la lengua. Se utilizará en concreto UNL (Universal Networking Language), considerado como la única interlingua de propósito general que está normalizada. La aproximación utilizada en esta tesis supone la continuación de trabajos previos realizados tanto por su autor como por el equipo de investigación del que forma parte, en los que se estudió cómo utilizar el modelo de las interlinguas en las áreas de extracción y recuperación de información multilingüe. Básicamente, el procedimiento definido en el método trata de identificar, en la representación UNL de los textos, ciertas regularidades que permiten deducir las piezas de la ontología del dominio. Debido a que UNL es un formalismo basado en redes semánticas, estas regularidades se presentan en forma de grafos, generalizándose en estructuras denominadas patrones lingüísticos. Por otra parte, UNL aún conserva ciertos mecanismos de cohesión del discurso procedentes de los lenguajes naturales, como el fenómeno de la anáfora. Con el fin de aumentar la efectividad en la comprensión de las expresiones, el método provee, como otra contribución relevante, la definición de un algoritmo para la resolución de la anáfora pronominal circunscrita al modelo de la interlingua, limitada al caso de pronombres personales de tercera persona cuando su antecedente es un nombre propio. El método propuesto se sustenta en la definición de un marco formal, que ha debido elaborarse adaptando ciertas definiciones provenientes de la teoría de grafos e incorporando otras nuevas, con el objetivo de ubicar las nociones de expresión UNL, patrón lingüístico y las operaciones de encaje de patrones, que son la base de los procesos del método. Tanto el marco formal como todos los procesos que define el método se han implementado con el fin de realizar la experimentación, aplicándose sobre un artículo de la colección EOLSS “Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems” de la UNESCO. ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is the automatic construction of ontologies from texts. This thesis is set within the area of Ontology Learning. This discipline aims to automatize domain models from structured or unstructured information sources, and had its origin with the beginning of the millennium, as a result of the exponential growth in the volume of information accessible on the Internet. Since most information is presented on the web in the form of text, the automatic ontology learning is focused on the analysis of this type of source, nourished over the years by very different techniques from areas such as Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Summarization and, in general, by areas related to natural language processing. The main contribution of this thesis consists of, in contrast with the majority of current techniques, the fact that the method proposed does not analyze the syntactic surface structure of the language, but explores his deep semantic level. Its objective, therefore, is trying to infer the domain model from the way the meanings of the sentences are articulated in natural language. Since the deep semantic level does not depend on the language, the method will allow to operate in multilingual scenarios, where it is necessary to combine information from texts in different languages. To access to this level of the language, the method uses the interlingua model. These formalisms, coming from the area of machine translation, allow to represent the meaning of the sentences independently of the language. In this particular case, UNL (Universal Networking Language) will be used, which considered to be the only interlingua of general purpose that is standardized. The approach used in this thesis corresponds to the continuation of previous works carried out both by the author of this thesis and by the research group of which he is part, in which it is studied how to use the interlingua model in the areas of multilingual information extraction and retrieval. Basically, the procedure defined in the method tries to identify certain regularities at the UNL representation of texts that allow the deduction of the parts of the ontology of the domain. Since UNL is a formalism based on semantic networks, these regularities are presented in the form of graphs, generalizing in structures called linguistic patterns. On the other hand, UNL still preserves certain mechanisms of discourse cohesion from natural languages, such as the phenomenon of the anaphora. In order to increase the effectiveness in the understanding of expressions, the method provides, as another significant contribution, the definition of an algorithm for the resolution of pronominal anaphora limited to the model of the interlingua, in the case of third person personal pronouns when its antecedent is a proper noun. The proposed method is based on the definition of a formal framework, adapting some definitions from Graph Theory and incorporating new ones, in order to locate the notions of UNL expression and linguistic pattern, as well as the operations of pattern matching, which are the basis of the method processes. Both the formal framework and all the processes that define the method have been implemented in order to carry out the experimentation, applying on an article of the "Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems" of the UNESCO-EOLSS collection.

Involvement and detachment in David Cameron and Ed Miliband’s political discourse. An analysis of deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’ in UK 2015 General Election news interviews

The goal of my study is to investigate the relationship between selected deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’ and the involvement/detachment dichotomy in a sample of television news interviews. I focus on the use of personal pronouns in political discourse. Drawing upon Caffi’s (2007) classification of mitigating devices into bushes, hedges and shields, I focus on deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’: I examine the way a selection of ‘I’-related deictic shields is employed in a collection of news interviews broadcast during the electoral campaign prior to the UK 2015 General Election. My purpose is to uncover the frequencies of each of the linguistic items selected and the pragmatic functions of those linguistic items in the involvement/detachment dichotomy. The research is structured as follows. Chapter 1 provides an account of previous studies on the three main areas of research: speech event analysis, institutional interaction and the news interview, and the UK 2015 General Election television programmes. Chapter 2 is centred on the involvement/detachment dichotomy: I provide an overview of nonlinguistic and linguistic features of involvement and detachment at all levels of sentence structure. Chapter 3 contains a detailed account of the data collection and data analysis process. Chapter 4 provides an accurate description of results in three steps: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis and discussion of the pragmatic functions of the selected linguistic features of involvement and detachment. Chapter 5 includes a brief summary of the investigation, reviews the main findings, and indicates limitations of the study and possible inputs for further research. The results of the analysis confirm that, while some of the linguistic items examined point toward involvement, others have a detaching effect. I therefore conclude that deictic shields on the pronoun ‘I’ permit the realisation of the involvement/detachment dichotomy in the speech genre of the news interview.

Romantic languages pamphlets

A collection of miscellaneous pamphlets on the romance languages.

Interpretation and typology Spanish indefinite pronoun uno in three discoursive genres

This study investigates the Spanish indefinite pronoun uno (“one”). After a detailed analysis of its occurrences in authentic language, we find that its interpretation varies depending on the linguistic context. Therefore, we examine which elements of the context - we focus on the broader context, beyond the sentence – have an impact on its interpretation and develop a typology of the indefinite pronoun as to its interpretation. The pronoun may be interpreted as completely generic or specific (referring to the speaker, the listener or a third person). Its interpretation can also be located in an intermediate position between these interpretive extremes.In addition, we compare its use in various discursive genres - spontaneous conversations, academic essays and web forum - which are distinguished by the presence or absence of interactivity and of more or less subjectivity / intersubjectivity. The comparison shows that pronoun use depends on these characteristics.