Arancha on A visual Approach to Natural Language

Arancha San Ginés (IHPST)

“Une approche visuelle au langage naturel. “

Une seule question articule l’ensemble des idées qui seront présentées :

Est-il possible de trouver un traitement uniforme aux pronoms anaphoriques ?

Alors que la réponse la plus répandue à cette question est négative, on essaiera de montrer qu’il existe, au moins, une réponse positive qui soit, aussi, envisageable. Notre approche sera fondée sur une idée clé selon laquelle les mécanismes sophistiqués de la construction visuelle jouent, de même, un rôle fondamental dans le langage naturel. C’est dans ce sens que l’on proposera un genre de représentation, diagrammatique, dont on en discutera quelques exemples caractéristiques en anglais et en français.

Martin on Style

Style: A new view on an old problem

Martin Siefkes, Technische Universität Berlin

Style is one of the few terms of cultural analysis which can be fruitfully used in completely different cultural areas: Style theories have been developed for texts (most often literary texts), for art, architecture, music, conversation, thinking and problem-solving. Less attention was rewarded on styles of athletes, of artisans, of playing a game, and of unremarkable daily activities such as walking or driving.

Up to now, the development of a general theory of style has not been attempted. In my doctoral thesis, I develop a general model of the stylistic sign process: It’s a process in which information is inscribed into and extracted out of realisations, which are based on schemata. The model is based on a semiotic framework in the structuralist tradition, supplemented by formal logics and an undogmatic formalism inspired by modern computer science.

The model has two main parts.

Roberto on musical notation

In his talk, Roberto first gave a ‘crash course’ in musical notation (notation for dummies!). Musical notation has some expressive limits, in relation to all the possible visual and sensory motor inputs it can represent. An important constraint is that it must be ‘readable’, and this constraint has its own costs and benefits.

The ‘big picture’ in the background is the following question about spatial syntactic features in different notations: are they denotative?