Download pdf
Testing Right Frontier Constraint on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven
- 1 Universitat Pompeu Fabra
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This paper focuses on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven as a case study to examine the narrator's conscious experiences and the challenges of interpreting coherence relations within this domain. It examines the concept of Right Frontier Constraint (RFC) from the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) and discusses its relevance in the context of The Raven. It further addresses the challenge of clarifying poetical effects through the lens of coherence relations and acknowledges the diversity of reader responses. This paper draws from the work of various researchers who have explored discourse segmentation and coordination, and applies global and micro analysis to further examine the themes of The Raven, and Poe’s use of poetical effect through the poem’s ambiguity and symbolism. The aim of this paper is to elucidate the intricate web of coherence relations within literary works such as The Raven while also offering potential avenues for future research to probe into the interpretation of coherence relations in conscious experiences.
Keywords
RFC, SDRT, Poe, Raven, Coherence
[1]. Kehler, A. (2022). "Coherence Establishment as a Source of Explanation in Linguistic Theory." Annual Review of Linguistics, 8, 124.
[2]. Asher, N. and Lascarides, A. (2003) Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
[3]. Polanyi, L. (1985). "A theory of discourse structure and discourse coherence." In Papers from the General Session at the 21st Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Eds. P.D. Kroeber, W.H. Eilfort, and K.L. Peterson.
[4]. Danlos, L. and Hankach, P. (2008). "Right Frontier Constraint for discourses in non-canonical order." In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Constraints in Discourse (CID’2008), Potsdam, Germany.
[5]. Poe, E.A. (1850). "The Philosophy of Composition" (reprint). In The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe — Vol II: Poems & Miscellanies, 2:259-270.
[6]. Grosz, B., and Sidner, C. (1986). "Attention, intention, and the structure of discourse." Computational Linguistics, 12(3), 175–204.
[7]. Mann, W.C., and Thompson, S.A. (1988). "Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization." Text, 8(3), 243–281.
[8]. Polanyi, L. (1988). "A formal model of the structure of discourse." Journal of Pragmatics, 12, 601-638.
[9]. Holler, A. and Irmen, L. (2007). "Empirically Assessing Effects of the Right Frontier Constraint." Lecture notes distributed in the topic 4410 "Anaphora: Analysis, Algorithms, and Applications," University of Heidelberg, Lagos, Portugal, March 29-30.
Cite this article
Hao,Y. (2024). Testing Right Frontier Constraint on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,36,62-70.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Social Psychology and Humanity Studies
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).