1,720,961 research outputs found
The role of focus marking in disjunctive questions: A QUD-based approach
Full text linkDisjunctive questions are ambiguous: they can either be interpreted as polar questions (PolQs), as open disjunctive questions (OpenQs), or as closed alternative questions (ClosedQ). The goal of this paper is to show that the difference in interpretation between these questions can be derived via effects of focus marking directly. In doing so, the proposal brings out the striking parallel between the prosody of questions with foci/contrastive topics on the one hand and that of alternative questions on the other. Unlike previous approaches, this proposal does not rely on structural differences between AltQs and PolQs derived via ellipsis or syntactic movement. To show how this works out, an account of focus and contrastive topic marking in questions is put forward in which f-marking in questions determines what constitutes a possible answer by signaling what the speaker\u27s QUD is like. By imposing a congruence condition between f-marked questions and their answers that requires answers to resolve the question itself as well as its signaled QUD, we predict the right answerhood conditions for disjunctive questions
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comprehending focus / representing contrast
Full text linkThis dissertation aims to show how existing behavioral evidence regarding the processing of focus can be brought more in line with an alternative-based understanding of focus as proposed in theoretical semantics, without loosing sight of the way general comprehension pressures may shape its interpretation. Throughout, I argue that this is possible by studying how the mental representations involved in the processing of focus are incrementally constructed during sentence comprehension. Reading measures obtained in a series of Maze experiments show that comprehenders arrive at a final interpretation of a focus by combining multiple sources of evidence, including lexical, conceptual and world-knowledge, as well as fine-grained linguistic representations that guide the incremental interpretation of focus independently from such general knowledge. These findings allow for a unified understanding of the inconsistent results previously found in the reading of focus, while also explaining how alternatives and discourse context are involved in the prioritization and anticipation of foci. Experiments 1-4 show, first, that the comprehension of focus generally induces a processing cost because reading times on foci are longer than on non-foci. It then shows that this cost is reduced when contrastive alternatives to the focus are mentioned in the preceding context, suggesting that the representation of contrastive alternatives is indeed involved in the comprehension of focus. The presence of focus marking induces a cost that is separable from a cost of interpreting newly introduced information, and that the presence of alternatives provides a reading benefit that is separable from a benefit due to semantic priming. Together, these findings suggest that contrastive alternatives must somehow be involved in the processing of focus, and that its cost cannot be explained in terms of a general cost for new material. Experiments 5-7 investigate how discourse context is used to assign a focus structure to a sentence in incremental sentence comprehension. It shows that the presence of contrasting material in the context is used by comprehenders to assign focus marking to subsequent sentences, suggesting that representations of contextual contrasts are utilized to anticipate the location of an upcoming focus. Again, results indicate that these behavioral effects of focus are separable from effects of newness or the predictability of upcoming material in general. This suggests that it is crucially the fact that comprehenders encode abstract representations of contextual contrasts that gives rise to these behavioral effects of focus, not the presumed communicative importance of foci or unpredictability alone. Finally, experiments 8-10 study what information comprehenders rely on in constructing an alternative set to a focus. This chapter again provides evidence for the claim that abstract linguistic representations of the discourse context are used to either rule in or rule out potential members of the alternative set to a focus. It shows that the deployment of these types of representations is fast, and independent from the use of general conceptual knowledge or the use of domain-general mechanisms such as semantic priming. I thus propose that comprehenders rapidly revisit semantic representations of the discourse context in constructing the alternative set to a focus
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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