Search

Usage of a as a marker of direct objects in Spanish has been a popular topic of research, but there is no clarity on how different factors interact. The current investigation looks at the historical change in usage of a, focussing on animacy, definiteness, and topicality. We analyzed the extent to which historical texts follow state-of-the-art theories, by combining automatic and manual annotation. The results indicate that the investigated texts to a large extent confirm existing theories, with some aspects worth noting. First of all, inanimate definite objects sometimes carry a, which is impossible according to prescriptive grammars. Second, we found an increase in the usage of a with definite human referents through time, which was predicted by Aissen (2003), although the limited amount of available data prevents us from drawing definitive conclusions. Furthermore, there is tentative evidence that topicality plays a role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents: (1) truth-conditions and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth-conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pictorial journalism in the latter nineteenth century faced a temporal conundrum: whereas words could travel by telegraph and hence at the speed of electricity, the accompanying illustrations had to travel as material objects and were chronically belated. This article analyzes the strategies with which two prominent Victorian weekly papers—Illustrated London News and Punch—sought to deal with the slowness of illustration and reconcile the speed differentials between textual and visual news with their printing deadlines and production cycles. The most striking of these strategies was to deploy an 'oracular pencil' to work up an illustration before an event had taken place. These pre-produced illustrations relied on specific visual codes that shaped the illustrations' 'truth.' The article shows that, contrary to the self-positioning of pictorial journalists as reporting truthfully and speedily on the world 'out there,' the pictorial press had its own temporal and epistemological laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the uses of the definite marker -tì in Longxi Qiang, a Tibeto-Burman language. Although the selection of referring expressions made by speakers is based on referent accessibility or cognitive status, at the same time, referring expressions have pragmatic and interactive dimensions. The concept of identifiability can account for the uses of the definite marker -tì; however, this concept is not sufficient to explain the selection of -tì in certain discourse contexts. Accordingly, this paper discusses the discourse uses of non-referential definite noun phrases. In addition to encoding definiteness, -tì serves as a prominence marker to trigger the interpretation that an entity, an action or a property is prominent, and the speaker intended to highlight the topicality. With respect to discourse functions, -tì is attached not only to noun phrases but also to verb and adjective phrases, fillers and connectors. These uses of -tì have been expanded into Wenchuan Mandarin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews what caricature represents for historians, after the political and social cataclysm raised by the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, while questioning the status of caricature in society. The introduction describes the circumstances and draws the portraits of the victims, designers of the magazine. The article then recalls the specificities of the caricature, its etymology first, then presents a brief history and describes its fields of application, the representations depending on the treatment most appropriate to the context of the reception by the readers. To illustrate the point, examples from the revolutionary period in France and Europe finally make it possible to define as closely as possible this political and artistic object, requiring a rigorous treatment which justifies its use in history.

With the continuous improvement of teaching quality in China's colleges and universities, English teaching has received more and more attention, and the automatic scoring system for English composition has begun to be gradually applied in English teaching in colleges and universities, but the system can only score compositions objectively, which is difficult to meet the actual teaching needs. Therefore, this study first proposes a topic richness based approach for analyzing composition cut points, and then proposes a combination based automatic grading method for English compositions. Based on the above, an intelligent grading improvement method based on composition tangent feature extraction is proposed to improve the efficiency of the English composition grading system and reduce the teaching burden on teachers. The traditional grading method is to grade grammar or essays by introducing Analytic Hierarchy Process, artificial neural networks, or combining machine learning theory with multi feature fusion. However, based on the characteristics of single semantic similarity and keyword alignment, the comprehensiveness of the grading is insufficient, making it difficult to analyze the correlation between essay sentences and the overall theme. The experimental results show that the topic decision-making model proposed in this study has better deep learning performance, and its scoring accuracy shows an upward trend with the increase of the sample data size of the essay, increasing from 40.05% to 91.46%. And the main content of the learned is the irrelevant information of the first sentence of a new topic and the truncation point, which can effectively distinguish whether a sentence is a topic segmentation point, and effectively identifies whether two sentences belong to the same topic; the proposed topic segmentation model has better practicality and its ability to segment topics is stronger; the combined method proposed in this study The overall performance of the model is better than the composition scoring methods based on RNN and BiLSTM models. Under the same semantic vectorization processing operation, the per values present in the composition sets are all different, and this result indicates that the writers' ability and the difficulty of writing on the topics are all different. It is hoped that this study can provide some solution ideas for the research of intelligent scoring feature extraction methods in English.

Assuming that poetry plays an active role in constituting our relationship with language and reality (Siscar, 2010), and considering the existence, in Brazil, of poets who write poetry “with evident signs of reading Portuguese literature” (Silveira, 2008), I seek to delve deeper, studying the work of poets who fit this description, one of the main characteristics of more recent Portuguese poetry, that is, the awareness of an irreversible “virtualization of the real” (Martelo, 2007). And this deepening involves, in my opinion, the consideration of problems related to self-knowledge, which entered the order of the day with the emergence of the Philosophy of Mind (Ryle, 1984) and with the radical skepticism represented by the supposed impossibility of accessing our own states mental (Putnam, 1975). As I try to demonstrate, rather than being characterized by the presence of a certain content of tradition, what certain contemporary Brazilian poetry proposes is an epistemological update of the dissent theme as a way of thinking, that is, as a language, by displacing its dialectic of distancing and rapprochement between conflicting poles (Marnoto, 2015) for the relationship between the self and its own consciousness, access to which has become as problematic as the perception of reality in poetry inherited from the modern tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Columns on language are characterised by the fact that they are discourses in which a problem related to language is discussed. They are argumentative texts in which subjectivity and scientific explanation are combined to influence groups of readers with whom they share broad areas of agreement. The aim of this paper is to analyse the topics on which the discourse on language in linguistic columnism is based from its origins to the present day. Based on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2015) typology of the places of argumentation quantity, quality, order, and essence a corpus of columns on language is analysed in order to find the argumentative correlates of these topics in the discourse on language. Their continuity over time and their relevance as characterizing elements of the metalinguistic discursive tradition they form will be shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the active/passive voice alternation in Kazym Khanty. According to the existing literature, the use of passive in Khanty is conditioned by information structure. Kazym dialect data, however, suggest that there are other parameters such as givenness and animacy that affect the choice of voice. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore the relevant parameters and highlight the ways they interact. The study reveals that in all-new contexts with no established topic speakers choose the voice construction based on animacy, while givenness and topi­cality play a decisive role on later stages of the discourse.

There is little consensus as to whether the use of implicit causal biases is driven exclusively by verb semantics or mediated by an interaction of verb semantics and other information sources. We tested whether the topic status of a subject modulates Korean speakers’ referential choices and processing in the interpretation of implicit consequentiality information. Results from two sentence-completion tasks (Experiment 1) showed more subject reference in participants’ continuations when the preceding subject was marked by the topic rather than the nominative marker, regardless of the directionality of the implicit consequentiality bias. In a self-paced reading task (Experiment 2), Korean speakers spent shorter reading times when the referent in the consequence clause was resolved as referring to the previous subject than when it referred to the previous object, although only in the topic-marked condition and not in the nominative-marked condition. Our results suggest that the implicit consequentiality effect remains consistent regardless of the subject’s topic status in the offline tasks, but the effect interacts with the topicality effect in real-time sentence processing. We discuss the implications of our findings for assumptions concerning the underlying mechanisms of referential resolution in discourse including causal bias verbs.

Reinhart (1983) proposed that quantificational binding is subject to a surface c-command condition. Her claim has been widely accepted in the literature on the syntax-semantics interface. However, Barker (2012) presented systematic counterevidence against the c-command requirement from English. The current paper addresses the role of c-command constraints in the grammar of three phenomena in German: relative quantifier scope, quantificational binding, and negative polarity. The results of a large corpus study are presented that demonstrate empirically that scope of one quantifier over another, quantificational binding, and the licensing of negative polarity items in German are systematically possible in structural configurations where surface c-command cannot reasonably be assumed to obtain. Further corpus evidence is produced which shows that the non-c-commanding quantifiers in the examples typically occur in contexts where the set they quantify over is discourse-old or easy to accommodate. The overall picture that emerges from the empirical evidence is that topicality motivates wide scope, and scope rather than c-command licenses negative polarity items and bound pronouns.

Copyright of Ostium is the property of Ostium and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article, theoretically anchored in Textual-Interactive Grammar, aims to discuss the regularity of a language unit within the scope of textual organization, in addition to collaborating in reflection on new possibilities regarding the teaching and learning of writing. To this end, it analyzes Topicality at its two levels of functioning - the intertopic organization and the intratopic organization, seeking to verify whether this process is systematic or whether it is variable. The adopted methodology assumes the discursive topic as an analysis category and investigates 47 written productions by higher education students. This investigation makes it possible to understand how elements of an essentially textual nature are organized and to maintain that the text is configured as a very systematic unit, as it presents its own organization, based on particular constituent principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Linguistica Uralica is the property of Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores the logics of magazine re-uses through three case studies, by focusing on pictures produced and reproduced by way of photography. The first case study focuses on half-tone reproductions in the early phase of the development of news photography, using the example of Collier’s Weekly during the Russo-Japanese War. It offers a historical case of transfers between book and magazine. In our second case, examining the American and French editions of Vogue, internal re-uses of content demonstrate both collaborative networks as well as a certain amount of latitude for divergence, and therefore further distinction within the Condé Nast brand. Our last example analyses the re-use of film stills in popular illustrated film magazines. These magazines manage their dependency on existing visual material provided by distribution companies for free, while striving, simultaneously, to highlight their ‘profile’ through visual design. The specific ways in which each magazine re-used images shed light on how respective editorial identities are carved, as well as more generally on magazines’ mediality: the latter, we argue, is showcased, in highly competitive print markets, partly through distinct(ive) re-using practices.

A common task in encounters with professionals is to identify a matter warranting professional assistance. Co-producing a 'social workable' matter in social work encounters as an interactional achievement is yet to be explored. Specifying this as an institutional and interactional project creates the opportunity to analyse how topics are collaboratively used in social work encounters to achieve a joint understanding of the work for the session. Such projects offer insights into the social actions involved in identifying matters that are relevant to the service, setting and professional encounter. Conversation analysis (CA) of real-world social work sessions offers a way to understand how social workers and clients produce, elaborate and pursue topics as a collaborative achievement. This detailed analytic approach illuminates how social workable matters are co-produced in interaction and creates an opportunity to examine and improve collaboration in interpersonal practice contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Computer Measurement & Control is the property of Magazine Agency of Computer Measurement & Control and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many models of reference production suggest that speakers tend to use a reduced referential form, such as a pronoun, to signal the topicality of a particular referent, that is, the Topichood Hypothesis. However, little is known about the precise nature of the mapping between topichood and referential form and the mechanisms by which topichood affects referential form. The current study aims to address these issues by investigating how topicality influences different kinds of reduced expressions, namely, null and overt pronouns in Mandarin. We manipulated topicality using a left‐dislocation structure in Experiment 1. We found that topicality increased the use of null pronouns, but not overt pronouns. This suggests that topicality may increase only the most reduced expression available in a given language. Experiment 2 examined whether the topicality effect was related to predictability. We found that participants used more null pronouns for less predictable referents. We suggest that the topicality effect could be better explained by an accessibility mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special issues are a unique mode of scholarly communication designed to highlight essential or emerging research themes through high-quality manuscripts. Special issues are increasingly becoming a fixture across a wide range of disciplines. Yet whether publishing special issues is necessarily a beneficial practice remains controversial. In this paper, we explore whether the actual effect of special issues meets the academic community's expectations, which is to enhance citation impact and highlight important research topics. Our sample, which comprises all special issue articles in all disciplines published between 2008 and 2017, reveals that there has been a proliferation of special issues across countries, institutions, and journals, with some differences among the disciplines. Opportunities to appear in special issues are more given to countries/institutions that achieved the highest overall research output. The effectiveness of special issues in promoting academic development varies across disciplines and even across journals. Honing in on library and information science as a case area to explore citation impacts and the topic distribution of special issues, we find that many special issues present high-impact manuscripts, especially those of the less prominent journals. However, the issue of publishing low impact manuscripts through special issues also exists in many fields. Special issues are also more likely to publish interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary articles and rarely discussed research themes compared to regular issues. Further, such topics are seldom explored on a large scale in the normal editions of the journal. To ensure the quality of the manuscripts, we recommend optimizing the procedures for selecting special issue topics and reviewing submissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I appraise the aesthetic and ideological implications of the use of the topical as source material for literary creation, with special focus on poetry. I underscore how the shared knowledge between the writer and the audience influences the craft of poetry and is equally crucial for the reception of a work of art. I link postcolonial writers’ fixation on the topical to Edward Said’s influential revaluation of Western historiography and privileging of the political in literary scholarship. I demonstrate my thesis primarily by examining selected poems from the anthology World on the Brinks: An Anthology of Covid-19 Pandemic (2020) as an instance of literary responsiveness to a topical global experience. I highlight and appraise the poets’ obvious allusions to, replications, appropriations, and interrogations of well documented discourses on the Covid-19 pandemic as a contestation of imperialistic theories and assumptions, and show how the topical and its discourses fundamentally influence the reception of the work of art. Focusing on the poets’ examination of the international politics of healthcare, and dispensing of palliatives, I interrogate the politics of the notion of common humanity vaunted in the wake of the pandemic’s exposure of the intangibility of territorial borders. In this article I equally reflect on the mechanisms of the survival and transformation of the topical in poetry.

In this article I appraise the aesthetic and ideological implications of the use of the topical as source material for literary creation, with special focus on poetry. I underscore how the shared knowledge between the writer and the audience influences the craft of poetry and is equally crucial for the reception of a work of art. I link postcolonial writers' fixation on the topical to Edward Said's influential revaluation of Western historiography and privileging of the political in literary scholarship. I demonstrate my thesis primarily by examining selected poems from the anthology World on the Brinks: An Anthology of Covid-19 Pandemic (2020) as an instance of literary responsiveness to a topical global experience. I highlight and appraise the poets' obvious allusions to, replications, appropriations, and interrogations of well documented discourses on the Covid-19 pandemic as a contestation of imperialistic theories and assumptions, and show how the topical and its discourses fundamentally influence the reception of the work of art. Focusing on the poets' examination of the international politics of healthcare, and dispensing of palliatives, I interrogate the politics of the notion of common humanity vaunted in the wake of the pandemic's exposure of the intangibility of territorial borders. In this article I equally reflect on the mechanisms of the survival and transformation of the topical in poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Direct objects in Dutch can precede or follow adverbs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as scrambling. The linguistic literature agrees in its assumption that scrambling is regulated by the topicality and anaphoricity status of definite objects, but theories vary as to what kinds of objects exactly are predicted to scramble. This study reports experimental data from a sentence completion experiment with adult native speakers of Dutch, showing that topics are scrambled more often than foci, and that anaphoric objects are scrambled more often than non-anaphoric objects. However, while the data provide support for the assumption that topicality and anaphoricity play an important role in scrambling, they also indicate that the discourse status of the object in and of itself cannot explain the full scrambling variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Lingüística de el Colegio de México is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Arnold Bennett was one of the key figures of early twentieth century British literature. However, although literary criticism has engaged with his novels, his dramatic oeuvre remains a blind spot in scholarship. In this article, I want to lay out the subtleties of his play Milestones (1912), which he wrote in collaboration with Edward Knoblock. In particular, I show that the text is characterised by an intense interest in minute detail, which manifests itself through a high number of topical allusions to political, cultural and social issues. Moreover I also consider these references in the context of the aim of the playwrights in writing the play more generally. Here, I suggest that the topical allusions serve to underpin the play’s main point about the necessity to accept change, especially with regard to the role of women, by illustrating the inevitability of change. Through its interest in Bennett’s dramatic contributions, this article, then, seeks to complicate our understanding of British drama at the turn of the twentieth century.

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The goal of the paper is to propose a holistic analysis of the discourse properties and the interpretational effects of pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian. Previous research has suggested that this is a topic construction, and it has been shown that the right-dislocated pronoun may affect reference assignment, is sometimes used in cases of discourse breaks, is associated with contrastiveness, and may lead to interpretational effects such as “emphasis” and “mitigation”. Based on Norwegian authentic corpus material, Givón’s (1983a) notion of marked constructions, and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) relevance theory, we present a novel analysis that connects the various properties of the construction together. A central aspect of our analysis is the assumption that marked constructions increase the accessibility of contrastive interpretations, which in turn may trigger the derivation of certain types of implicatures. Since the analysis is mainly based on assumptions about human cognition, the study makes cross-linguistic predictions despite its focus on one language.

This essay will assess the extent to which screened broadcasts of Shakespeare plays in Hong Kong contribute to a sense of cosmopolitan cultural identity in the city, and engage with current issues and events, as Shakespearean presentist theory argues. I will discuss how this relatively recent digitally mediated traffic in transnational Shakespeare, functioning as it does as a simulacrum of the physical theatre-going experience, resonates with the sociocultural ethos of Hong Kong. Like the asynchronous – as opposed to simulcast – theatre broadcast of Western Shakespeare, the time seems palpably "out of joint" to many residents of the city. A major factor affecting the continuation of Hong Kong's hitherto rich cultural life is the rapidly accelerating erosion of its autonomy and supposedly guaranteed civic freedoms, following Beijing's imposition of sweeping national security legislation. The essay discusses the significance of Shakespeare theatre broadcast in this highly charged political atmosphere in Hong Kong, with its dwindling, but stubbornly residual, cultural links to the country of the dramatist's birth. The second part will explore the local resonances of four broadcast theatre productions of Shakespeare plays in Hong Kong, Coriolanus and Hamlet (both NT Live) and The Tempest and Titus Andronicus (both RSC Live). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of International Social Research is the property of Journal of International Social Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this work we analyze the anaphoric devices employed in topic continuity and topic shift in the semi-spontaneous narrations of three groups of speakers: Italian Natives, Greek Natives and near-native second language speakers (L2ers) of Italian with Greek as a first language (L1). According to some recent literature, near-native speakers of a null subject language over-use overt pronouns even when their L1 is also a null subject language. It is still unclear whether this over-use is tied to differences in the languages involved (e.g. Italian and Spanish, Filiaci et al. 2014) and hence might be the result of cross-linguistic influence. Our data reveal that in Italian pro has a more specific function than in Greek in signaling topic continuity. The characteristic of pro in Italian is preserved in the L2ers productions. We also found that L2ers over-use overt pronouns, particularly in topic continuity, despite the similarity of their two languages in this respect. Finally, we single out an additional factor that influences speakers’ choice of anaphoric devices, i.e. the number and kind of active referents, proving evidence that all speakers’ groups employ overt pronouns particularly when there are two active animate referents that differ for gender and/or number, and L2ers significantly more than the other two groups. Our findings thus show that micro-variation in the use of anaphoric devices is attested among null subject languages, while the over-use of overt pronouns by L2ers stems from their difficulty in establishing topicality under higher degrees of cognitive load.

No final da década de 1960, artigos de Luiz Beltrão revelavam seu interesse em observar as horas e espaços destinados pela televisão às informações jornalísticas. Compreendeu, rapidamente, a capacidade que a imagem eletrônica exercia diante do espectador. Observou que a revolução tecnológica e de conteúdo, provocada pela TV, forçava uma mudança de comportamento da imprensa tanto na linguagem do noticiário quanto nas estratégias de venda. Visionário, praticamente previu o surgimento de emissoras nos moldes da CNN. Entre os pontos que Beltrão definiu como caracteres pertinentes ao jornalismo estão atualidade e promoção, que focamos nesse artigo, e, mais detidamente, na ideia de promoção, utilizada por Beltrão com pertinência, quando pensou nas possibilidades que a mensagem televisiva difundir notícias com responsabilidade social.

This study investigates the licensing conditions and interpretational variability of indefinite subjects in Mandarin. Against the 'definiteness' constraint of subject in Mandarin (Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1981), three types of indefinite subjects are identified in the subject position, but they exhibit different scope behaviors: (i) you-nominals are ambiguous between a wide scope and a narrow scope, and (ii) thetic subjects are narrow-scope taking, and (iii) 'cardinal' subjects are scopeless. Following Cohen and Erteschik-Shir (2002), we propose that the former two types of indefinite subjects are focus elements and they fall into the position of nuclear scope, where they receive an existential interpretation, and cardinal subjects are topics and they serve as restrictor to some generic operator. Moreover, the wide/narrow scope readings of you-nominals are distinguished from each other in terms of whether a topic domain is available or not, which may serve a domain restrictor to the existential quantifier bound to you-nominals (Portner 2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focus and newness are distinct features. The fact that subconstituents of focus can be given or discourse-old has been pointed out in Selkirk (1984) and Lambrecht (1994). Nevertheless, when it comes to Sentence Focus, it is still common to equate Focus with newness, and to treat SF sentences as necessarily all-new. One of the reasons for such bias is that formally or typologically oriented descriptions of SF tend to analyze only intransitive 'out of the blue' SF utterances stemming from elicitation. Based on SF utterances in natural speech in Kakabe, a Western Mande language, the present study shows that in natural speech SF utterances are associated with a rich array of discourse strategies. Accordingly, the discourse properties of the referents inside SF are subject to variation and affect the implementation of the focus-marking. The study also shows how the discourse properties of referents define the distribution of the focus marker in Kakabe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract We propose an indicator to measure the degree to which a particular news article is novel, as well as an indicator to measure the degree to which a particular news item attracts attention from investors. The novelty measure is obtained by comparing the extent to which a particular news article is similar to earlier news articles, and an article is regarded as novel if there was no similar article before it. On the other hand, we say a news item receives a lot of attention and thus is highly topical if it is simultaneously reported by many news agencies and read by many investors who receive news from those agencies. The topicality measure for a news item is obtained by counting the number of news articles whose content is similar to an original news article but which are delivered by other news agencies. To check the performance of the indicators, we empirically examine how these indicators are correlated with intraday financial market indicators such as the number of transactions and price volatility. Specifically, we use a dataset consisting of over 90 million business news articles reported in English and a dataset consisting of minute-by-minute stock prices on the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ Stock Market from 2003 to 2014, and show that price volatility, transaction volumes, and the number of transactions exhibited a significant response to a news article when it was novel and topical.

The Holy Fathers, “great scholars and teachers”, are considered as the normative representatives of the doctrinarian tradition of the Church, as especially authorized witnesses of faith. They led a holy life and also distinguished themselves through the fact that they preached the teachings received from the Saviour and the Holy Apostles.They are not only the representatives of the doctrinarian tradition of the Church, but also the witnesses and criteria of true faith, the judges of Orthodoxy – this feature has not only a historic value and dimension, but also atemporal and generally spiritual ones. The Holy Fathers are extremely “contemporary”, as they reach directly the Christians in our times and provide answers to the essential questions of mankind. By studying the patristic literature, we acquire the way of thinking of the saints, which is helpful at anytime and in any circumstance and allows us to show our faith and answer topical issues as they themselves would have done if they were still alive now. By a careful and pious reading of the works of the Holy Fathers, contemporary human beings may find the solutions to their problems and thean swers to their questions, as they are models of Christian living, wisdom and simplicity, and their theological knowledge and the truths they preached were un animously accepted and admired by the whole Church.

The present paper explores Differential Object Marking in a variety of Asturian (Western Iberian Romance) spoken in western Asturias (northwestern Spain). This ancestral form of speech stands out from Central Asturian and especially from Standard Spanish. For a number of reasons, ranging from profound changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and information structure to slight but very relevant effects on syntax. The main goal of this study is to examine the special marking of direct objects in order to find out what triggers the distribution of Differential Object Marking in this variety. To this aim, this paper will examine, from a variationist perspective, the influence of a number of semantic and discourse-pragmatic parameters on the marking of direct objects in this Western Asturian language as well as in Standard Spanish 1 and Central Asturian (which is generally considered the normative variety of Asturian). The results obtained from this comparison will allow us to outline the differences between these three varieties in terms of object marking, shedding more light on the origin and function of Differential Object Marking in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: In storytelling environments, recipients' questions have mainly been described as non-affiliative. This article examines how the topicality of story-responsive questions relates to the recipients' displays of affiliation. Furthermore, we investigate whether there are differences between the practices of neurotypical participants (NT) and participants diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (AS) in this regard. While aiming to uncover the practices of story-responsive questions in general, we also seek to shed light on the specific interactional features associated with AS. Method: Our method is qualitative conversation analysis. Drawing on a dataset of Finnish quasi-natural conversations, we compare the interactional consequences of story-responsive questions asked by NT- and AS-participants. Results: We show how the NT-participants in our data use a specific set of practices to manage the topical relevance of their questions, while the AS-participants' production of otherwise very similar questions differs precisely with reference to these practices. Discussion: We argue that the different ways in which the NT- and AS-participants treat the topicality of their questions influence the relative affiliative import of the questions in subtle, but yet significant ways. Conclusions: The affiliative import of story-responsive questions can only really be seen in retrospect, since, in their subsequent turns, the questioner can cast their action as having prepared the ground for affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines how Japanese language learners use referential expressions in discourse, especially topicalized or non-topicalized subjects, in addition to whether the first language of a Japanese language learner influences the choice of referential expressions. The text of narrative stories, written in both the subject's first language and second language (i.e. Japanese) by native Chinese speakers and native Korean speakers, as well as text written by Japanese native speakers, were analyzed. As a result, the first language influence and common difficulties were observed in the use of referential expressions by Japanese language learners. Using referential expressions is not simply a matter of negative or positive transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the distribution and function of a suffix that has been labelled 'ergative' in the literature on Dalabon, a Gunwinyguan (non-Pama-Nyungan) language of south-western Arnhem Land. Our first-hand data reveal that although this marker (-yih) more frequently occurs on A arguments of multivalent clauses, it also appears with significant frequency on S arguments of monovalent clauses, particularly with the verb root yin 'to say, to think, to do'. We explain this non-canonical distribution with a co-dependent analysis of its discourse and pragmatic functions, summarized by the principle 'mark out the unexpected referent', following McGregor's Expected Actor Principle. These functions differ slightly according to clause type. For both types, the marker has a discourse function of 'mark out the non-topical referent': either an A argument that sufficiently threatens the construal of local topics, or an S referent after a long period of deferred topichood (particularly speaker referents). The marker also has a correlating pragmatic function of 'mark out the contrary referent': either an A participant acting against the motivations and expectations of other (topical) referents (or of the speaker), or an S participant with an unusual stance or speech content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]