Text in Afrikaans / Because of the variety of relationships which exist between transitive verbs and their objects, all direct objects are not comparable with one another. One class of object, however, which stands by itself and which is of considerable interest, is the OBJECT OF RESULT. Because of the particular relation which exists between object and transitive verb in resulting constructions, we have here an unique class of direct object. The resulting construction is therefore, in the first instance a relation construction. This specific relation between transitive verb and object is mainly determined by the presence of or absence of certain inherent distinctive characteristics by transitive verbs and which play a determining role in identifying OBJECTS OF RESULT. From this study it is also clear that there is a semantic value present in transitive verbs (that can combine with objects of result) which has not been observed or distinguished by lexicographers and grammarians until recently. / Omdat voorwerpe van sinne in 'n verskeidenheid van betrekkinge met (oorganklike) werkwoorde kan staan, is alle direkte voorwerpe nie almal in alle opsigte vergelykbaar met mekaar nie. Waarskynlik die interessantste voorwerp in hierdie verskeidenheid is die RESULTATIEWE VOORWERP. As gevolg van die besondere verhouding wat daar bestaan tussen hierdie voorwerp en die HW, het ans hier te make met 'n unieke tipe direkte voorwerp wat kan aanspraak maak op 'n eie bestaansreg as 'n subkategorie van die hoofkategorie: Direkte Voorwerpe. Die resulterende konstruksie is dus, in die eerste plek, 'n verhoudingskonstruksie. Hierdie spesifieke verhouding tussen die HW en die voorwerp word grootliks bepaal deur die aan- of afwesigheid van sekere inherente distinktiewe kenmerke wat by oorganklike werkwoorde voorkom en wat 'n bepalende rol speel by die ontstaan van en identifisering van RESUL TATIEWE VOORWERPE. Uit hierdie ondersoek sal verder blyk dat daar 'n semantiese waarde by oorganklike werkwoorde is wat tot dusver nag nie deur taalkundiges/woordeboekmakers of woordverklaarders onderskep en onderskei is nie. Oorganklike werkwoorde kan dus fyner gedefinieer word ten opsigte van hul verbindbaarheid, al dan nie, met resultatiewe voorwerpe. / Language Education, Arts and Culture / M.A. (Afrikaans)

The inadequacy of the usual possible world semantics of modal languages when the meaning of 'belief' is attached to the modal operator is discussed. Three other approaches are then investigated. In the case of Moore's autoepistemic logic it becomes possible to compare an agent's beliefs to 'reality', which cannot be done directly in the possible world semantics. Levesque's semantics makes explicit in the object language the notion of 'this is all the information the agent has', which plays an important role in nonmonotonic reasoning. Both of these approaches deal with ideal reasoners. The third approach, Konolige's deduction model, is based on a semantics capable of describing the beliefs of one or more resourcebounded agents. Finally, the AGM postulates for belief revision are discussed. / Computer Science / M.Sc. (Computer Science)

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:23:15Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5539.pdf: 15158253 bytes, checksum: d6cc57168e18018f0fbd4a7f5770b16c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-10-17 / Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais / This dissertation aims to analyze the world-building process as spaces of transmidiatic communication. We listed information from the distinct media utilized on the development of the TV series Lost, including it internal narrative complexity. We studied and classified distinct factors that congregated the user interaction in an online community. We investigated the conditions of meaning production and the discursive and ideological formations enounced in a complex system of communicational interaction. We also observed how the authorfunction acts in collaborative ambient from the web 2.0. This research is qualitative and exploratory, and examines the Darkufo online community, constituted by users that were fans of the TV-series Lost. Based on the netnographic methodology and using the discourse analysis studies, we tried to systematize the processes that involve users and the online community interactive ambient. / A presente dissertação propõe-se a analisar o processo de construção de mundos online como espaços de comunicação transmidiática. A pesquisa relaciona as informações provenientes dos distintos meios utilizados para o desenvolvimento da narrativa seriada do programa televisivo Lost, bem como sua complexidade narrativa. Através deste estudo, puderam ser classificados os diferentes fatores que congregaram a interação dos usuários em uma comunidade online. Também foram investigadas as condições de produção de sentidos e as formações discursivas e ideológicas enunciadas dentro de um sistema complexo de interação comunicacional. Também observamos como o modo de produção da função-autor pode ser estabelecido em ambientes colaborativos da web 2.0. De natureza qualitativa e exploratória, essa pesquisa é um estudo sobre a comunidade online de fãs da série televisiva norteamericana Lost, intitulada DarkUfo, e buscou estabelecer relações entre o processo de construção de mundos textuais e as postagens feitas na comunidade. Com base na metodologia da Netnografia e da Análise do Discurso, buscou-se sistematizar o conhecimento dos processos que envolvem os usuários e o ambiente interativo proporcionado pela comunidade online.

(in English) This thesis deals with space in Japanese science fiction literature in 1960s. The aim is to find out specificity of japanese space in works with apocalyptic endings. Theoretical part deals with concept of possible worlds, various approaches to space and above all with theory of fictional worlds, which I use as main methodology of this thesis. Practical part is topoanalysis and comparison of three selected literary works: Inter Ice Age 4 (Dai yon kanpyōki 第四間氷期, 1959) by Abe Kōbō 安部公房 (1924-1993), Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights (Hyaku oku no hiru to sen oku no yoru百億の昼と千億の夜, 1967) by Mitsuse Ryū 光瀬竜 (1928-1999) and Japan Sinks (Nihon chinbotsu 日本沈没) by Komatsu Sakyō 小松左京 (1931-2011). In topoanalysis I focus primarily on island position of Japan and role of the ocean.

Les fins du voyage chez Peter Fleming sont entendues comme déclins, comme lignes de rupture, comme aboutissements, comme principes moteurs et comme finalités. Trois pistes sont explorées pour comprendre ces fins ; la première postule une volonté anesthétique de la part de l’auteur : la finalité de nier son expérience esthétique et en même temps de rechercher l’extrême en tant qu’anesthésique, en tant que palliation, reproduction et transfert d’expériences traumatiques. La seconde concerne son utilisation de l’art rhétorique pour reproduire et en même temps se jouer des conventions et des attentes du lecteur. On peut parler ici d’une psychologie inversée qui va lui permettre de brouiller ses pistes, de multiplier les interprétations potentielles et de réfléchir son identité de manière protéiforme. Enfin, la troisième propose l’étude des aspects dunamiques de ses récits – un néologisme faisant référence à la sphère de la potentialité. Ce modèle permet de construire une analyse littéraire et anthropologique des alternatives pensées, envisagées et narrées par l’auteur qui va complémenter celle des discours et des itinéraires actualisés. L’identité auctoriale est définie dans ce contexte comme un espace intermédiaire, trans-mondes et hétérotopique, qui se situe entre tous les possibles et ce qui est. / The ends of travel in Peter Fleming’s works are seen as declines, lines of rupture, outcomes, driving principles and goals. Three paths are explored to understand these ends. The first postulates an anaesthetic intention on the part of the author: the purpose of denying his aesthetic experience and at the same time of seeking extreme sensation as an anesthetic, as palliation, reproduction and transfer of traumatic experience. The second focuses on his use of rhetorical art to reproduce and, at the same time, to play with the conventions and expectations of the reader. His use of reverse psychology allows the creation of a broad spectrum of interpretations and the projection of his identity in a protean manner. Finally, the third aims at analyzing the dunamic aspects of his narratives – a neologism referring to the sphere of potentiality. This model allows the literary and anthropological analysis of the potential alternatives contemplated, suggested and narrated by the author, one that is meant to complement the study of his actual itineraries and discourses. Authorial identity is defined in this context as an intermediate, trans-world and heterotopic space which lies between what is and everything that could be.

En prenant comme point de départ l'interprétation de l'épopée homérique par Erich Auerbach, ce mémoire se consacre à la notion d'immersion fictionnelle, non sous son versant psychologique de phénomène contingent de la conscience imageante, mais sous son versant imaginaire, en tant que mythe sociétal d'immédiateté déterminant des stratégies esthétiques et médiatiques concrètes, que j'articule autour des poétiques contemporaines de construction de mondes (world building). L'enjeu est de saisir les répercussions esthétiques de ce fantasme d'une représentation qui occulterait à la fois sa médiateté et le réel-sensible, à une époque où la transfictionnalité et la transmédiaticité s'élèvent tranquillement comme modes narratifs dominants de notre culture occidentale contemporaine. Avec cette conviction que le terme d'immersion doit être replacé dans le cadre de ses effets, le premier chapitre s'affairera à démêler quelques difficultés théoriques que pose la notion en la problématisant sous l'égide des questions ontologiques de vérité et de la position phénoménologique de Sartre sur l'imaginaire. Tout en posant les outils théoriques nécessaires aux analyses subséquentes, le deuxième chapitre approfondit cette problématisation en empruntant aux théories modales des mondes possibles un cadre conceptuel opératoire, qui amènera, notamment grâce au concept formalisé de «~monde~», à concevoir la fiction comme un mouvement de distanciation. Appuyé par la lecture du roman tolkienien, le troisième chapitre tourne le fantasme d'immersion du côté d'une pulsion encyclopédique de complétude, concrétisée par des stratégies textuelles d'accumulation informationnelle et de virtualisation de données diégétiques laissées en suspens -- effets d'actualité que je qualifie d'extra-narratifs en les présentant en contraste des principes prescriptifs du \emph{muthos} aristotélicien formant une chaîne causale téléologique fondée sur une loi d'économie narrative. Le quatrième et dernier chapitre, articulé autour de la notion encore trop peu étudiée de canonicité, observe les poétiques de construction de mondes telles qu'elles se désamorcent elles-mêmes, dans le contexte des univers partagés, en engendrant des incohérences logiques donnant lieu à la tenue d'un discours auctorial-éditorial régissant les vérités fictionnelles comme moyen de maintenir l'immersivité de la représentation. L'analyse générique des comic-books de superhéros et une enquête sur la gestion éditoriale de l'univers de Star Wars permettront d'identifier les multiples modalités de délimitation de la frontière entre canon et apocryphe. En conclusion, je reviens brièvement sur la notion d'immersion, ainsi exemplifiée, en la resémiotisant comme une médiation compétitive de mise en présence de l'être. / Starting from Erich Auerbach's interpretation of the Homeric epic, this master's dissertation studies the notion of fictional immersion, not in its psychological aspect of a contingent phenomena of human consciousness, but rather in its collective imaginary sense, as a societal myth of immediacy generating concrete aesthetic and media strategies that I investigate from the standpoint of contemporary poetics of world building. The objective is to apprehend the aesthetic repercussions of this desire for a mediation that would conceal both the real and its own mediacy, in a time where transfictionality and transmedia storytelling are becoming more and more the dominant narrative modes of our contemporary western culture. Under the conviction that immersion must be looked at as a set of cultural strategies, the first chapter unravels some theorical difficulties bounded to the term by problematizing it towards ontological questions of truth and Sartre's phenomenological stance on the imaginary. While laying a necessary theorical toolset for subsequent analyses, the second chapter examines these problems by borrowing to possible worlds modal theories a set of working concepts, which will lead to the assumption that fiction is a movement of distanciation, notably with the aide of the formal concept of ``world''. Through a reading of the tolkienian novel, the third chapter directs the desire for immersion towards an encyclopedic impulsion for completeness, embodied by textual strategies such as informational proliferation and allusion to virtual diegetic data -- strategies leaving an impression of the actual that I describe as extra-narrative in contrast to Aristote's \emph{muthos} forming a teological causal chain based on a principle of an unitary narrative. The fourth and final chapter, articulated around the still too little studied notion of canonicity, observes poetics of world building as they neutralize themselves, particularly with shared universes, by generating logical inconsistencies giving birth to authorial and editorial discourses stating fictional truths as a way of maintaining the mediation's immersivity. The analysis of the superhero comics genre and an inquiry of the editorial management of the Star Wars universe will exemplify the multiple modalities of this delimitation between the canon and the apocryphal. As a conclusion, I briefly come back to the notion of immersion itself by redescribing it as a competitive mediation of presence.

Les villes projetées dans la littérature sont des espaces idéaux pour comprendre les tensions de notre temps. En reflétant les contradictions sociales produites par l'économie, l'accès inégal au pouvoir, la coexistence entre différents groupes culturels, etc., elles nous permettent de réfléchir aux caractéristiques complexes d'un monde en mutation permanente. L’objectif principal de cette thèse est d’analyser les villes littéraires de Mario Levrero comme des dispositifs narratifs qui permettent de constater la fin de certains projets politiques, sociaux et culturels du XXe siècle face à l’émergence d’un modèle qui tend vers la mondialisation. Ce travail est basé sur une hypothèse théorique qui peut être résumée comme suit : plus la complexité de notre système politique et économique est grande, plus il est difficile d'imaginer et de représenter la réalité dont nous faisons partie. Cela est particulièrement évident dans les représentations urbaines de Levrero, qui symbolisent le sentiment de désorientation caractéristique du sujet postmoderne avant d’échouer à cartographier tout aspect de la réalité contemporaine. Cela nous permet d'analyser la portée politique de ces représentations, puisqu'elles supposent à la fois un diagnostic sans espoir du présent et une projection ratée de l’avenir. Les villes imaginaires de Levrero fonctionnent comme des scénarios de l'effondrement d'un monde connu et de l'émergence d'un monde nouveau pour lequel les personnages ne disposent d'aucun outil d'interprétation. / Projected cities in literature have been proven to be ideal spaces to understand the tensions of our time. By representing the social contradictions produced by the economy, the unequal access to power or the coexistence between different cultural groups, they allow us to reflect on the complex characteristics of a world in permanent transformation. The main objective of this thesis is to analyze the literary cities of Mario Levrero as narrative devices with which to observe the coming to an end of certain political, social and cultural projects of the twentieth century in the face the emergence of a model that tends towards the dissolution of the regional in the global. This work is based on a theoretical assumption that can be summarized as follows: the greater the complexity of our political and economic system, the greater the difficulty in imagining and representing the reality we are a part of. This is particularly clear in the urban representations of Levrero, which symbolize the sense of disorientation that distinguishes the postmodern subject before the failure of every attempt to map any aspect of contemporary reality. This allows us to analyze the political significance of these representations: they entail, on the one hand, a diagnosis of hopelessness for the present and, on the other, an outlook of failure for the future. The cities of Levrero function as backgrounds for the collapse of a known world and the emergence of a brand new one with characters that lack any tools for its interpretation.

In this dissertation, I investigate the cognitive processes integral to intertextual readings by referring to the cognitive linguistics framework known as conceptual blending. I refer to different genres of intertextual texts and then explain these intertexts in terms of cognitive principles and processes, such as conceptual blending networks. By applying the framework of conceptual blending to intertexts within different genres, I suggest that the underlying cognitive processes are universal for the interpretation of any type of intertextual text. My findings indicate that conceptual blending underpins intertextuality which is cognitive, creative and dynamic in nature. This means that the meaning we construct from intertexts is dependent on the context in which they appear and cannot be studied in isolation. Investigating intertextual texts from a cognitive linguistics perspective reveals new inferences (such as the influence of implicit knowledge as a type of intertext) and the creativity involved in the meaning-making process. / Linguistics / M.A. (Linguistics)

This dissertation is about the nature of perspectival thoughts and the context-sensitivity of the language used to express them. It focuses on two kinds of perspectival thoughts: ‘subjective' evaluative thoughts about matters of personal taste, such as 'Beetroot is delicious' or 'Skydiving is fun', and first-personal or de se thoughts about oneself, such as 'I am hungry' or 'I have been fooled.' The dissertation defends of a novel form of relativism about truth - the idea that the truth of some (but not all) perspectival thought and talk is relative to the perspective of an evaluating subject or group. In Part I, I argue that the realm of ‘subjective' evaluative thought and talk whose truth is perspective-relative includes attributions of knowledge of the form 'S knows that p.' Following a brief introduction (chapter 1), chapter 2 presents a new, error-theoretic objection against relativism about knowledge attributions. The case for relativism regarding knowledge attributions rests on the claim that relativism is the only view that explains all of the empirical data from speakers' use of the word "know" without recourse to an error theory. In chapter 2, I show that the relativist can only account for sceptical paradoxes and ordinary epistemic closure puzzles if she attributes a problematic form of semantic blindness to speakers. However, in 3 I show that all major competitor theories - forms of invariantism and contextualism - are subject to equally serious error-theoretic objections. This raises the following fundamental question for empirical theorising about the meaning of natural language expressions: If error attributions are ubiquitous, by which criteria do we evaluate and compare the force of error-theoretic objections and the plausibility of error attributions? I provide a number of criteria and argue that they give us reason to think that relativism's error attributions are more plausible than those of its competitors. In Part II, I develop a novel unified account of the content and communication of perspectival thoughts. Many relativists regarding ‘subjective' thoughts and Lewisians about de se thoughts endorse a view of belief as self-location. In chapter 4, I argue that the self-location view of belief is in conflict with the received picture of linguistic communication, which understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. I argue that understanding mental content and speech act content in terms of sequenced worlds allows a reconciliation of these views. On the view I advocate, content is modelled as a set of sequenced worlds - possible worlds ‘centred' on a group of individuals inhabiting the world at some time. Intuitively, a sequenced world is a way a group of people may be. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on sequenced worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. In chapter 5, I show that one of the advantages of this model is its compatibility with both nonindexical contextualism and truth relativism about taste. I argue in chapters 5 and 6 that the empirical data from eavesdropping, retraction, and disagreement cases supports a relativist completion of the model, and I show in detail how to account for these phenomena on the sequenced worlds view.

This dissertation is the application of counterfactual criticism to Shakespearean tragedy—supposing we are to ask, for example, “what if” Hamlet had done the deed, or, “what if” we could somehow disinherit our knowledge of Lear’s madness before reading King Lear. Such readings, mirroring critical practices in history, will loosely be called “counterfactual” readings. The key question to ask is not why tragedies are no longer being written (by writers), but why tragedies are no longer being felt (by readers). Tragedy entails a certain urgency in wanting to imagine an outcome different from the one we are given. Since we cannot change events as they stand, we feel a critical helplessness in dealing with feelings of tragic loss; the critical imperative that follows usually accounts for how the tragedy unfolded. Fleshing out a cause is one way to deal with the trauma of tragedy. But such explanation, in a sense, merely explains tragedy away. The fact that everything turns out so poorly in tragedy suggests that the tragic protagonist was somehow doomed, that he (in the case of Shakespearean tragedy) was the victim of some “tragic flaw,” as though tragedy and necessity go hand in hand. Only by allowing ourselves to imagine other possibilities can we regain the tragic effect, which is to remind ourselves that other outcomes are indeed possible. Tragedy, then, is more readily understood, or felt, as the playing out of contingency. It takes some effort to convince others, even ourselves, that the tragic effect resonates best when accompanied by an understanding that the characters on the page are free individuals. No amount of foreknowledge, on our part or theirs, can save us (or them) from tragedy’s horror.