Multimodality in the poetry of Lillian Allen & Dionne Brand : a social semiotic analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis develops social semiotic theory by asking it to account for the \nmeaning-making practices of African-Canadian poets Lillian Allen and \nDionne Brand. Its primary aim is to develop the theory, though it attempts \nto describe in new and interesting ways certain moments in these oral / \nwritten texts at the margins of the literary. The research question, what is \nthe relationship between spoken creole and English writing? is an entry into \nthe political issues raised by the texts themselves, and larger issues of \nclisciplinarity and the epistemologies of linguistic and literary studies. \nAfter giving an account of their literary-historical and black feminist contexts \nand an overview of the poetry of Allen and Brand, I look for a poststructuralist \nsemiotic model of the relationship between letter and sound in \nDerrida's "The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing". Finding his \n-07 \nversion phonetic writing too restricted to account for the practices of Allen \nand Brand, and deconstruction only a partial explanation of Caribbean \nfeminist poetics, I develop a critical sociolinguistic / social semiotic account of language standardisation, conventionality, and grammar. With the aid of \nSaussure's Cours 4 linguistique generale, I work out the formal properties of \nthe sign necessary to account for these, and then go on to explain how they \nwork in the texts of Allen and Brand using two social semiotic principles of \nproduction: "projection" and "embodiment". My thesis is that orality is a \nmode, as is dialect (including standardised language), the English grapholect, \nand the semiotic body. Each of these has certain meaning-making \naffordances not accessible in the others. The writing of Allen and Brand, as \nwell as Allen's performance, use each of these modes to create different \nmeanings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".