Readers 读者
Exploring surface cues for deep lessons in children’s stories: A preliminary analysis with Aesop’s fables
由淺入深：從表層語言特徵探索寓言故事的深層意義
Oi Yee Kwong 鄺藹兒
Abstract 摘要
Stories are typified and distinguished from other genres structurally and semantically by their specific coherent relations and characteristic goal conflicts respectively. As a special kind of stories, fables are often additionally associated with a moral. Storytellers deploy different lexico-grammatical constructions, rhetorical devices and discourse strategies within specific narrative structures, enabling the stories to be retold in numerous ways with the intended message invariably conveyed. To this end, we are particularly interested in how one might leverage various surface linguistic devices to probe the deep lessons in fables, especially before immersing oneself in sophisticated reasoning with comprehensive world knowledge. In this paper,1 we introduce a bilingual corpus compiled from different published versions of Aesop’s Fables in English and Chinese, detailing the annotations done at the structural, semantic, and emotional level; and with particular reference to the Chinese texts, discuss the role of some surface linguistic properties in the realisation of the moral and thus their potential contribution in story understanding.
Keywords 關鍵詞
Narrative structure 敍事結構 Story understanding 故事理解 Corpus annotation 語料庫標註 Surface linguistic properties 表層語言特徵 Aesop’s Fables 伊索寓言