Starting from an introduction on ecocriticism the work traces the development of the idea and the representations of nature in the ancient world which so much influenced the Middle Ages; it focuses on the English world by offering an interpretation of the natural world in Beowulf, and draws conclusion on possible eco-oriented ideas of the relationship between humans and the natural world in the ancient Classic and in the Anglo-Saxon worlds. Then the work surveys representations of the natural world in the English Literature of the Middle Ages, considering the fundamental influence of the 12th century philosophical ideas and also offering various examples of different philosophical and cultural approaches to the idea and to the representation of nature and oh humanity's relation with it. From these premises the work finally proceeds to offer an eco-oriented interpretation of some of Chaucer's works: Troilus and Criseyde, the House of Fame, the Parlement of Foules, and a small selection from the Canterbury Tales. The study of these works shows how Chaucer, albeit not deeply or exclusively involved with the specific matter of an "ecological" idea of the relationship between humanity and nature (also due to the fact that culture in the Middle Ages was seen as a composite but at the same time monolithic system, with little disciplinary specialization), was definitely interested in the subject and in his portrait of human interior and social life both on an individual and on a collective level, he does not miss the chance to exhort his audience to keep an ethical behavior not only toward the other humans, but toward the natural world itself, which is the source for human life and human imagination alike.

Si tratta di un'indagine approfondita circa il concetto di Eingedenken" che Walter Benjamin utilizza nei suoi scritti dal 1927 fino alla morte (nel 1940)."

This thesis' aim is to add some pieces to the complex puzzle on the mechanism behind the comprehension of conversational implicatures. To do so, in a series of experiment we manipulated both the type of implicatures (scalar vs. ad-hoc) and the population under investigation (typical vs. atypical; children vs. adults).

Effective methods for evaluating the reliability of statements issued by witnesses and defendants in hearings would be extremely valuable to decision-making in Court and other legal settings. In recent years, methods relying on stylometric techniques have proven most successful for this task; but few such methods have been tested with language collected in real-life situations of high-stakes deception, and therefore their usefulness outside laboratory conditions still has to be properly assessed. DeCour - DEception in COURt corpus - has been built with the aim of training models suitable to discriminate, from a stylometric point of view, between sincere and deceptive statements. DeCour is a collection of hearings held in four Italian Courts, in which the speakers lie in front of the judge. These hearings become the object of a specific criminal proceeding for calumny or false testimony, in which the deceptiveness of the statements of the defendant is ascertained. Thanks to the final Court judgment, that points out which lies are told, each utterance of the corpus has been annotated as true, uncertain or false, according to its degree of truthfulness. Since the judgment of deceptiveness follows a judicial inquiry, the annotation has been realized with a greater degree of confidence than ever before. In Italy this is the first corpus of deceptive texts not relying on ‘mock’ lies created in laboratory conditions, but which has been collected in a natural environment. In this dissertation we replicated the methods used in previous studies but never before applied to high-stakes data, and tested new methods. Among the best known proposals in this direction are methods proposed by Pennebaker and colleagues, who employed their lexicon - the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (liwc) - to analyze different texts or transcriptions of spoken language, in which deception could have been used, but collected in an artificial way. In our experiments, we trained machine learning models relying both on lexical features belonging to liwc and on surface features. The surface features were selected calculating their Information Gain, or simply according to the frequency they appear in the texts. We also considered the effect of a number of variables including the degree of certainty the utterances were annotated as truthful or not and the homogeneity of the dataset. In particular, the classification task of false utterances was carried out against the only utterances annotated as true, or against the utterances annotated as true and as uncertain together. Moreover subsets of DeCour were analysed, in which the statements were issued by homogeneous categories of subject, e.g. speakers of the same gender, age or native language. Our results suggest that accuracy at deception detection clearly above chance level can be obtained with real-life data as well.

The philosopher H. P. Grice was the first to highlight the extent to which our ability to communicate effectively depends on speakers acting cooperatively. This tendency to cooperation in language use, recognized since Grice’s William James lectures, has been a key tenet of subsequent theorizing in pragmatics. Yet it’s also clear that there are limits to the extent to which people cooperate: theoretical and empirical studies of the Prisoner’s Dilemma have shown that people prefer to cooperate if the other party cooperates, but not otherwise. This would suggest that in language use, as well, the level of cooperation depends on the other person’s cooperativeness. So far, however, it has proven remarkably difficult to test such prediction, because it is difficult to analyze cooperation and communicative style objectively, and the schemes proposed so far for, e.g., non-verbal cues to cooperation tend to have low reliability. In this study the existence of a negative correlation between emotions and linguistic cooperation is demonstrated for the first time, thanks to newly developed methods for analyzing cooperation and facial expressions. The heart rate and facial expressions of the participants in a cooperative task were recorded after uses of cooperative and uncooperative language; facial expressions and the level of linguistic cooperation in each utterance were classified with high reliability. As predicted, very high negative correlations were observed between heart rate and cooperation, and the facial expressions were found to be highly predictive of her level of cooperation. Our results shed light on a crucial aspect of communication, and our methods may be usable to research in other aspects of human interaction as well.

No description available.

No description available.

<p>The expression of <em>lin-11</em> is regulated by enhancers located upstream from, as well as within, <em>lin-11</em> intronic sequences. Multiple regulatory inputs control the spatiotemporal expression pattern of <em>lin-11</em>. To better understand that process, we have investigated these regulatory enhancers by dissecting two of the biggest intronic sequences of <em>lin-11</em>: intron 3 and intron 7. Using microscopy, we show that the expression of intron 3 is required in ten head sensory neurons and that the expression of intron 7 is required in two head neurons. The truncation of intron 7 revealed that its regulatory sequence may be located within its narrow 98 base pairs (bp) region. We used bioinformatics to predict which putative transcription factor(s) may regulate AVG expression. Using a hypersensitive RNAi mutant strain, <em>eri-1; lin-15b,</em> we tested forty putative transcription factors and quantitated the number of animals in which the molecular marker <em>lin-11::GFP</em> expression is knockdown in AVG interneurons.</p> <p>Using electrotactic behavioral analysis we show that the speed of<em> lin-11</em> null allele, n389, is reduced by almost 50%, when compared to that of the wildtype animals, due to amphid sensory neuronal deformities. We determine which conserved domains of <em>lin-11</em> are required for the proper development of the neuronal and vulval cells via microinjection rescue experiments.</p> <p>We sequenced eleven <em>lin-11</em> alleles to determine which conserved domains are affected and the role of each of these domains in the development of vulval and neuronal cells. Our findings suggest that all <em>lin-11</em> conserved domains are required for proper vulval cell differentiation as well as for proper development of the amphid sensory neurons. Finally, using tissue specific markers we label vulval cells in <em>lin-11</em> mutants to show that those cells are defective, as judged by the lack of fate-specific markers in the vulval cells.</p> / Master of Biological Science (MBioSci)

Defining the meaning of vague quantifiers (‘few’, ‘most’, ‘all’) has been, and still is, the Holy Grail of a mare magnum of studies in philosophy, logic, and linguistics. The way by which they are learned by children has been largely investigated in the realm of language acquisition, and the mechanisms underlying their comprehension and processing have received attention from experimental pragmatics, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. Very often their meaning has been tied to that of numbers, amounts, and proportions, and many attempts have been made to place them on ordered scales. In this thesis, I study quantifiers from a novel, cognitively-inspired computational perspective. By carrying out several behavioral studies with human speakers, I seek to answer several questions concerning their meaning and use: Is the choice of quantifiers modulated by the linguistic context? Do quantifiers lie on a mental, semantically-ordered scale? Which are the features of such a scale? By exploiting recent advances in computational linguistics and computer vision, I test the performance of state-of-art neural networks in performing the same tasks and propose novel architectures to model speakers’ use of quantifiers in grounded contexts. In particular, I ask the following questions: Can the meaning of quantifiers be learned from visual scenes? How does this mechanism compare with that subtending comparatives, numbers, and proportions? The contribution of this work is two-fold: On the cognitive level, it sheds new light on various issues concerning the meaning and use of such expressions, and provides experimental evidence supporting the validity of the foundational theories. On the computational level, it proposes a novel, theoretically-informed approach to the modeling of vague and context-dependent expressions from both linguistic and visual data. By carefully analyzing the performance and errors of the models, I show the effectiveness of neural networks in performing challenging, high-level tasks. At the same time, I highlight commonalities and differences with human behavior.

In this thesis, I study the differences in form and interpretation presented by event-denoting nominalizations. Frequently, languages have more than one type of event nominalization, such as deverbal nouns derived by means of suffixes (Italian mutamento / mutazione, ‘change’, ‘mutation’, or English assignment, explosion) and their corresponding verbal nouns, e.g. infinitives (il mutare, ‘the changing’) or gerunds (exploding). These are usually perceived as alternatives, since their semantic difference is not clearly understood by neither native speakers nor linguists. The aim of this work is to understand the rationale that leads us to choose one form instead of the other and to define the linguistic features involved. The hypothesis underlying the whole thesis is that different forms are never true synonyms and, thus, present some differences in use, distribution or meaning. In a first study, I explore the role of the base verb in the nominalization selection. I investigate if the various nominalizations are formed from different types of base verbs and which characteristics define their domain of application. By means of statistical modeling, I highlight how the transitivity of the base verb partially determines which nominalization is preferred. Moreover, I show that NIs are not used to make up for the lack of a corresponding EDN, refuting previous claims. Then, I move forward analyzing the cases in which both forms are derived from the same base and I try to understand if they differ in meaning. In the second study presented, I use collocation analysis to observe their semantic dissimilarities. With focus on a single syntactic pattern, I find out that nominal infinitives and deverbal nouns inherit only part of the base verb senses. The former usually prefer metaphorical and abstract senses, whereas the latter select more concrete and literal ones. Lastly, I use distributional semantic models to observe quantitatively the semantic shift of the two processes. I confirm the hypothesis that nominal infinitives are more transparent and more semantically regular than deverbal nouns, given their inflectional nature. The studies presented have been conducted on Italian and German; however, the findings are relevant for the general treatment of nominalizations and may be replicated for further languages. Overall, my work shows how quantitative analyses of corpus data can help us investigate problems that are hardly addressed by linguists introspection. Moreover, it includes in the study of nominalizations nominal infinitives, non-finite verbal forms which, contrary to English gerunds, have not received the attention they deserve.