20.516, Disc: New: Representing paraphrases of paraphrases

[LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List: Vol-20-516. Wed Feb 18 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.516, Disc: New: Representing paraphrases of paraphrases

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Randall Eggert, U of Utah  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Catherine Adams <catherin at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html.

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 18-Feb-2009
From: Greg Kochanski < greg.kochanski at phon.ox.ac.uk >
Subject: New: Representing paraphrases of paraphrases
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:38:22
From: Greg Kochanski [greg.kochanski at phon.ox.ac.uk]
Subject: New: Representing paraphrases of paraphrases

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=20-516.html&submissionid=206072&topicid=5&msgnumber=1
  


Linguists spend a lot of paper describing what other linguists said about
something. It's common so see a sentence like this in a publication: ''The
idea that the syntactic frammistan was a co-paradigmatic member of
the relational tier was first suggested by Smith (1924), and supported by...''
(All content has been surgically removed from the preceding quote.)

In itself, this is fine. The trouble comes when someone reads that
paraphrase and uses it as the basis for their own paraphrase. Now, no one
should be doing that without reading the original source, but (a) people do
cut corners occasionally, and (b) even if you read the original source, you
may still be
affected by the paraphrased version. (Especially, for instance, if the
paraphrase is well-written and captures the main idea in a very compact form.)

So, after several generations of this, it's easily possible for the
original meaning to become lost. Or, more commonly, the original idea gets
simplified and gently warped towards the dominant paradigm. If you keep
your eyes open, it's not hard to find cases where -- by the time something
gets into the textbooks -- it has changed quite a bit from the original
research.

So, to minimize this problem, you'd like to keep your paraphrase as close
as possible to the original author's text. You'd even like to use some of
his/her words and phrases, if possible. But, of course you need to make it
clear that the words are a close paraphrase and not a quote or not your own.

So, it seems like a new punctuation mark might be in order. I call it a
semiquote, and suggest that we might use the little double angle-brackets
that are used for quotes in many languages. A more detailed explanation
can be found at 
http://kochanski.org/gpk/research/misc/2008/Semi_Quote.html 

Thoughts? 


Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics
                     Discourse Analysis
                     Pragmatics






-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-20-516