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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Tracking the main characters in narratives written by pupils with referential continuity ties annotation

Lydia-Mai Ho-Dac

Résumé

This study proposes a new resource and a method for describing the procedures used by pupils for creating cohesive ties and more specifically referential continuity ties. This method involves systematic annotation of the linguistic expressions referring to the main characters of texts written by pupils at school. According to Werth's Text World Theory (1999), "The normal procedure for introducing information is [...] a reference is first established (typically with an indefinite NP), and then is subsequently maintained (with some kind of anaphora). This essentially simple picture is complicated by three things : (i) evoked knowledge differs enormously, both qualitatively and quantitatively, from one person to another ; (ii) if an entity is manifest in the environment, then it is often unnecessary to go through the whole reference procedure ; and (iii) as we have seen, information can be introduced non-standardly, by way of accommodation." The aim of this study is to describe the kind of procedure used by pupils for introducing and maintaining characters in discourse and to analyse if these procedures differ according to external criteria such as the education grade or the difficulty of the schoolwork instruction. The annotation method is based on three principles. First, only the topical characters i.e. those involved in the instruction given to the pupils will be tracked. This first principle facilitates the annotation process and contrastive analysis between education grades and difficulty levels of instruction. Secondly, the linguistic expressions have been annotated following the Democrat guidelines that provide fine-grained definitions for identifying and delimiting referential expressions in a French (Landragin 2015). Thirdly, the referential continuity ties taken into account in the annotation process are co-referential relations and transitions from a individual reference to a collective one. This last principle permits to track the main characters of/in the text world built by pupils, even if these characters are merged in a collective reference that could be splitted subsequently. Example (1) shows the beginning of such a refential continuity extracted from the resource and written by a second grade pupil (referential expressions related to one of the main character of the instruction -- a witch -- are signalled with **). (1) Once upon a time there was *a very nice witch* *who* lived in the forest. One day, *she* met a wolf. *They* became best friends [...]. In (1), the reference is typically established with the indefinite NP "a very nice witch" and maintained with the pronouns "who" and "she" before being included in the plural reference expressed by the personal pronoun "They". In addition, the analysis of typical procedures could be enlarged by combining referential continuity annotations with other annotation layers provided in the resource i.e. the revisions (texte deletions and additions by the pupils itself) and the misspellings (Ho-Dac et al. 2020). The revisions give cues regarding questions and choices the pupils made during writing. The misspellings give cues regarding writing expertise of the pupils. Altogether, these annotation layers bring new insights for describing writing skills acquisition in terms of discourse organisation. Ho-Dac, L.-M., Fleury, S. and Ponton, C. (2020) E:Calm Resource: a Resource for Studying Texts Produced by French Pupils and Students. In Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), pp. 4327-4332. Landragin, F. (2015). Description, modélisation et détection automatique des chaînes de référence (democrat). Bulletin de l’AFIA, 92 :11–15. Werth, P. (1999). Text worlds : Representing conceptual space in discourse. Longman : London.

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hal-04584790 , version 1 (23-05-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04584790 , version 1

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Lydia-Mai Ho-Dac, Josette Rebeyrolle. Tracking the main characters in narratives written by pupils with referential continuity ties annotation: (co)Referential expressions as discourse "markers" (DMs) that contribute to discourse organisation by (indicating how to) connecting discourse units with referential continuity ties. International Conference Discourse Markers Theories and Methods, Ludivine Crible, May 2023, Paris Diderot, France. ⟨hal-04584790⟩
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