This book focuses on the importance of topical reading in understanding Islamic figures and themes, and applies this approach to two landmark Elizabethan plays: George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar and William Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven. The former is the first English play to present a Moor as a major character, while the latter is the first English play to be based on Quranic material and feature the Prophet of Islam as a major character. In both plays, the book argues, topical concerns played a major role in the formation of Islamic characters and themes, rendering the term ‘representation’ highly debatable. The book also briefly covers other Elizabethan plays that contained Islamic elements, such as Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice, and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. Topical issues covered in the work include British-Muslim relations, the Spanish Armada, Elizabethan patriotism in literature, Catholic-Protestant tensions in the late 16th century, the gynaecocracy debate, and Elizabethan alchemy and magic.

Salience refers to the prominence of information; salient items pop out and capture attention. This volume addresses the role of salience in discourse. It illustrates the range of multidisciplinary approaches - their diversities and similarities. The collection of papers covers a variety of research with different foci ranging from discourse entities, to discourse segments, to extra-linguistic factors.

At present there exists no empirically-motivated theory of how perceivers assign a grammatically-permissible interpretation to a sentence. Implicit in many investigations of language comprehension is the idea that each constituent of a sentence is interpreted by the perceiver at the earliest conceivable point, using all potentially relevant sources of information. A variety of counter examples are presented to argue against this implicit theory of sentence interpretation. It is argued that an explicit alternative theory is needed to specify which decisions are made at which points during interpretive processing and to spell out the principles governing the processor's preferred choice at points of ambiguity or uncertainty. Several specific issues are taken concerning how the processor assigns a focal structure to an input sentence, how it identifies the topic of the sentence, how implicit restrictors on the domain of quantification are interpreted and how the identification of the content of a restrictor may guide the processor's use of discourse information. Exploiting intuitions about preferred interpretations of ambiguous sentences as well as the results of both old and new experimental studies, a theory of the preferred interpretation of Determiner Phrases is presented. This work explores important, but overlooked questions in on-line sentence interpretation and attempts to erect some of the scaffolding for an eventual theory of sentence interpretation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2007, held in Rome, Italy in April 2007. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory and design, efficiency, peer-to-peer networks, result merging, queries, relevance feedback, evaluation, classification and clustering, filtering, topic identification, expert finding, XML IR, Web IR, and multimedia IR.

This book explores speakers’ intentions, and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ, in spoken Arabic – which is different in many essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain linguistic structure in spoken Arabic. This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant parts of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world, including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation, the use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to understand the role of "disinformation" structure. The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives including pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and (de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book provides an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet understudied, component of spoken Arabic.

This handbook presents an overview of the phenomenon of reference - the ability to refer to and pick out entities - which is an essential part of human language and cognition. In the volume's 21 chapters, international experts in the field offer a critical account of all aspects of reference from a range of theoretical perspectives. Chapters in the first part of the book are concerned with basic questions related to different types of referring expression and their interpretation. They address questions about the role of the speaker - including speaker intentions - and of the addressee, as well as the role played by the semantics of the linguistic forms themselves in establishing reference. This part also explores the nature of such concepts as definite and indefinite reference and specificity, and the conditions under which reference may fail. The second part of the volume looks at implications and applications, with chapters covering such topics as the acquisition of reference by children, the processing of reference both in the human brain and by machines. The volume will be of interest to linguists in a wide range of subfields, including semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and psycho- and neurolinguistics, as well as scholars in related fields such as philosophy and computer science.

The contents of this volume are a selection from the papers given at the Sixth International Conference on Functional Grammar (ICFG), which was held in York, at the University College of Ripon and York St John, from 18 to 22 August, 1994. Functional Grammar as understood in the ICFGs and in this volume is the linguistic model as proposed by Simon Dik, and to date most extensively described and discussed in Dik (1989). The indebtedness of the FG-community to Simon Dik, who died six months after the conference was held, is great indeed. The editors hope that this volume is a fitting tribute to his work.

This study breaks new ground in describing how various linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms affect both the form of the narrative clause and the arrangement of the grammatical elements. The various possible forms that a narrative clause can take are classified in terms of their 'topic-comment' and 'focus-presupposition', and it is argued that the way in which these are articulated dictates the word order in the clause. The outcome of the study demonstrates that the traditional binary distinction between foreground and background, based purely on verb forms, is inadequate. A new model is offered showing how foregrounding is achieved by exploiting cognitive structures or by using specific evaluative devices.

The two-volume set LNAI 7818 + LNAI 7819 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2013, held in Gold Coast, Australia, in April 2013. The total of 98 papers presented in these proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 363 submissions. They cover the general fields of data mining and KDD extensively, including pattern mining, classification, graph mining, applications, machine learning, feature selection and dimensionality reduction, multiple information sources mining, social networks, clustering, text mining, text classification, imbalanced data, privacy-preserving data mining, recommendation, multimedia data mining, stream data mining, data preprocessing and representation.

This volume contains innovative papers that target the linguistic status of topic at the interface between grammar and discourse. The purpose of the volume is to discuss the universal properties of topics and, at the same time, to document the range of discourse-semantic and grammatical variation within this phenomenon in European languages. The volume is structured accordingly: (i) theoretical foundations of topicality in grammar and discourse; (ii) discourse-semantic correlates of topicality; (iii) variation in the grammatical (external and internal) encoding of topicality; (iv) topics from the diachronic perspective. The articles take different perspectives, including contrastive studies of modern languages, studies on diachronic development, and typological generalizations. They also take into consideration various types of empirical data – introspective data, semi-spontaneously produced data, experimental data and language corpora. The articles in this volume show that the concept of topic is necessary for the description and explanation of a number of discourse-semantic phenomena. They present a state of the art account of the architecture of topic while making recent research on the phenomenon accessible to a wider readership.