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Encoding topic, focus and contrast: Informational notions at the interfaces
No full textLa presente tesi analizza i fenomeni di strutturazione degli enunciati secondo criteri di natura informazionale. Si pone due obiettivi principali: a) l’elaborazione della semantica delle nozioni di ‘topic’, ‘focus’ e ‘contrasto’; b) l’indagine sui processi relativi alla loro grammaticalizzazione.
Per quanto riguarda il primo punto, si propongono definizioni in grado di identificare ciascuna delle tre unità informazionali in maniera univoca. Nello specifico, dopo aver mostrato che la definizione di ‘topic’ elaborata da Reinhart in termini di ‘aboutness’ risulta problematica, questa nozione informazionale è identificata con costituenti frasali che appaiono in strutture marcate a livello sintattico e che sono interpretati come necessariamente ‘d-linked’. La definizione di ‘focus’ è iscritta nel quadro della ‘semantica alternativa’ (Rooth, 1992). Infine, gran parte dell’attenzione è volta a mostrare che il contrasto è un’unità informazionale autonoma, in opposizione ai tentativi di ridurlo al focus, basati sull’osservazione che, come quest’ultimo, esso svolge la funzione di evocare alternative nel discorso. Nello specifico, vengono presi in considerazione enunciati in cui il contributo semantico del contrasto è facilmente distinguibile da quello del focus. Lungi dal complicare l’ontologia delle nozioni informazionali, l’ipotesi sull’autonomia del contrasto consente di formulare un’analisi originale delle nozioni di topic contrastivo e focus contrastivo: contrariamente agli autori che considerano questi ultimi come categorie indipendenti della struttura informazionale, si mostra che la loro natura linguistica è il risultato dell’interazione tra il contrasto, da un lato, e, alternativamente, topic e focus dall’altro.
Per quanto riguarda il secondo punto, la tesi si propone di comprendere come i differenti moduli del linguaggio interagiscano per l’espressione delle categorie informazionali. Sulla base di evidenza teorica ed empirica, si conclude che le nozioni informazionali non sono grammaticalizzate come tratti di discorso, in opposizione ai recenti contributi elaborati nell’ambito della cartografia. L’analisi dell’espressione linguistica del contrasto è particolarmente rilevante a questo proposito: la variazione prosodica a cui l’occorrenza di un’interpretazione contrastiva si associa è difficilmente riconducibile a operazioni del sistema computazionale. Piuttosto, l’analisi dei dati sperimentali è maggiormente compatibile con l’idea, proposta recentemente da autori come Tania Reinhart e Ad Neeleman, che le nozioni informazionali sono grammaticalizzate all’interfaccia tra la sintassi e i sistemi esterni d’uso. Questa idea si fonda sull’ipotesi che il linguaggio è un sistema ottimale, in cui le interfacce sono in grado di codificare informazioni sulla base di proprietà leggibili della struttura sintattica.
Le lingue esprimono le nozioni informazionali in modi differenti, ricorrendo alla sintassi (si pensi al movimento dei topic inglesi o alla generazione dei topic italiani nella periferia sinistra dell’enunciato) o alla fonologia (ad esempio, l’accento principale della frase cade sui costituenti focalizzati e l’espressione del contrasto si associa ad un aumento della prominenza fonetica del costituente corrispondente). Questa tesi non si propone di rendere conto di tale variabilità interlinguistica: la discussione verte principalmente sull’italiano. Tuttavia, altre lingue vengono prese in considerazione ogniqualvolta l’analisi comparativa è utile alla comprensione dei vari fenomeni. Per esempio, l’ipotesi sulla semantica dei foci contrastivi in italiano si basa sull’osservazione del comportamento linguistico dei foci contrastivi in ungherese e il confronto tra italiano e spagnolo risulta fondamentale per la formulazione di una proposta originale sulla natura dei topic post-focali.The dissertation deals with the encoding of discourse notions in sentence structure. Its aim is twofold: a) to elaborate a semantics for ‘topic’, ‘focus’ and ‘contrast’; b) to investigate how these three notions are coded in grammar.
As for the former issue, it has been attempted to formulate definitions which could be able to identify each of the three informational units unequivocally. More specifically, after discussing some difficulties inherent in Reinhart’s definition of topic in terms of ‘aboutness’, I will identify topics with constituents appearing in syntactically marked structures and interpreted as necessarily d-linked. On the other hand, the definition of focus will be couched within the Alternative Semantics framework (Rooth, 1992). Most of the theoretical effort, however, will be directed toward showing that contrast is an autonomous informational unit, contrary to those authors who claim that it should be reduced to focus, according to the observation that they both evoke alternatives in discourse. In particular, I will introduce plenty of data in which the semantic contribution of contrast can be easily distinguished from the one of focus. Instead of complicating the ontology of informational notions, the hypothesis about the autonomy of contrast offers new insights into the linguistic nature of both contrastive topics and contrastive foci. Contrary to those authors that treat the latter as independent categories of information structure, I will show that their behavior could be explained in terms of the interaction between contrast, on the one hand, and topic and focus, on the other hand.
As for the latter issue, the main purpose of the dissertation is to understand how the different components of language interact with each other for the expression of the abovementioned information-structure related notions. In particular, I will provide theoretical and empirical evidence against the idea that informational notions are coded as discourse-features heading their own functional projections in the syntactic structure (hence, against the analyses of information structure couched within cartographic frameworks). With this regard, the analysis of the linguistic encoding of contrast will be the most revealing one: it will be shown that the expression of this informational category correlates with variations in the prosody of the associated constituent, which is hardly explainable in terms of operations involving the underlying syntactic structure. It will be claimed that the analysis of the experimental material is more compatible with the line of investigation (recently pursued by authors like Tania Reinhart and Ad Neeleman), according to which informational notions are coded at the interface of syntax with the external systems of use, i.e., outside the computational system. This assumption is grounded on the more general hypothesis that language is an optimally-designed system, so that the interfaces are able to code information on the basis of visible properties of the syntactic derivations.
Languages express informational notions through a large variety of linguistic means, either syntactic (e.g., movement to the left periphery exhibited by English topics and base-generation in the C-domain of their Italian counterparts) or phonological (e.g., main sentence stress assignment on focused constituents and increase of the phonetic prominence associated with contrastive phrases). In this dissertation, I will not account for this cross-linguistic variability. Rather, I will deal mainly with Italian data, extending the analysis to other languages whenever the comparative analysis will lead to a deeper understanding of the phenomena of stake each time. For example, my hypothesis on the semantics of Italian contrastive foci will be inspired by the observation of the linguistic behavior of their Hungarian counterparts or the comparison between Italian and Spanish will shed new light on the linguistic nature of postfocal topics
Presupposizione
Full text linkL'articolo consiste in uno stato dell'arte sul fenomeno linguistico della presupposizion
Towards a Taxonomy of Focus Types. The case of Information Foci and Contrastive Foci in Italian
No full textThis paper investigates the semantics of Information focus and Contrastive focus in Italian. Throughout the literature, there have been some recent attempts to show that they both have the same semantic representation at LF. After arguing against these theories, I propose a semantic model for the interpretation of Information Focus and Contrastive Focus, according to which the latter is a subtype of the former, specified for exhaustivity. The model aims to bring together the theoretical advantages of both Rooth’s theory for the interpretation of focus and Horvath’s proposal about the intervention of an exhaustivity operator in the derivation of Hungarian Contrastive Foci. The purported differences between Italian and Hungarian are explainedin terms of constraints on the type of objects which can enter in the
domain of application of the exhaustivity operator
Towards a phonological account of contrast in Italian: a pilot-study on Contrastive Topics
No full textThe idea that contrast is an autonomous informational component on par with topic and focus has been suggested in some
recent contributions about information structure. This paper aims to support this idea with arguments of both theoretical and
empirical nature. Focusing on the linguistic phenomenon of contrastive topics (CTs), I will show that the complex
semantic/pragmatic effects they give rise to can be better understood disentangling CTs into their basic informational
constituents, i.e., contrast and topic. In particular, I will analyze the semantic contribution of the former to the overall
interpretation of CTs. This will represent the preliminary step for investigating the issue of how contrast is encoded
linguistically. To this aim, I set up an experiment in which the phonology and the phonetics of both contrastive and noncontrastive
constituents were examined. The preliminary data seem to suggest that contrastive interpretations are expressed
by means of prosodic features, in the form of either phonetic or phonological features. From the general design of the
experiment it emerges that certain linguistic phenomena could be better explained by relying on the notion of contrast; by this
means contrast is shown to be a category of grammar. If the results of this pilot-study will be confirmed by extending the
data-set, there will be several implications for the general architecture of grammar and for our understanding of the way in
which the different components of language interact
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
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