This contribution examines comparatively six Japanese translations of Song of Myself, focusing on a five-line segment from Section 4. Although to different degrees, the Japanese versions display a noticeable tendency towards lexical, grammatical and stylistic over-specification. The following types of phenomena were identified: referential over-specification; use of stylistically marked units instead of neutral ones; shift to tighter syntactic structures, with subordination instead of coordination; explicitation of cognitive modality by sentence-final particles or adverbs. These changes significantly narrow down the range of possible interpretations of the text, sometimes up to a univocal designation which reflects the translators’ misguided attempt to ‘clarify’ the text, thus profoundly altering the Japanese reader’s interpretive experience. Objective difficulties arising from the semantic organization and typological characteristics of Japanese are distinguished from translation choices that seem to originate in subjective predilections. In each case, the accuracy of the six versions is assessed, and more appropriate solutions are sought for, on the basis of a cross-linguistic comparison with several Spanish, French and German translations.

The paper focuses on Eugenio Coseriu’s outlook on the nature of textual meaning (sense), and aims at highlighting the specificity and originality of this theoretical view in the historical moment when it emerged on the international scene of linguistics, in the latter half of the 20th century, as well as its topicality in the context of contemporary trends in the disciplines of discourse / textuality. We begin by discussing a series of fundamental tenets of Integral Text Linguistics, or “text linguistics as a hermeneutics of sense”, envisaged by Coseriu as a linguistics of Level III (individual), coherently interconnected with the linguistics of Levels II and I (historical and universal) in his triadic model of speaking as a cultural activity: the “double semiotic relation” in discourse, the relation between text-constitutive units and strategies (elements of textual expression) and units of sense, the issue of the objectivity of textual sense. We then proceed to demonstrate that a privileged methodological path for attesting the objectivity of textual sense in genuine texts is the process of translation, and especially the comparative analysis of different translated versions, in multiple languages, of the text in question. This approach is based on the fact that Coseriu views translation as a peculiar technique of speech, a ‘speaking raised to the power of two’, in which the expressive means of another language are harnessed in order to re-constitute a textual meaning that is already given, with all the details of its articulation, in the original text. Using Dylan Thomas’ famous poem Do not go gentle into that good night, we illustrate how the units and procedures of textual constitution are articulated in a genuine text to the effect of triggering the process of sense construction / interpretation. If we treat the text as an integral whole and follow the sense-construction process up to the maximal identifiable limit of all its constitutive relations, it becomes objectively necessary to connect Thomas’ poem to several Shakespearean plays. Contrastive analyses with the poem’s translated versions into Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian serve to substantiate the tenet that, within the hermeneutic approach of integral text linguistics, translation can provide benchmarks for ascertaining the vectors that guide the construction of sense in genuine texts.

The present contribution focuses on Mircea Borcilă’s typology of poetic texts, which proposes a multi–layered semantic-functional categorization of different modes/modalities of sense creation. It is argued that, although initially developed with a view to explaining in a coherent framework the fundamental aesthetic differences between the works of several major Romanian poets from the 20th century, this model is in fact operative as a general poetic typology, apt to explain the specificity of poetic sense construction in different linguistic-cultural contexts as well. Moreover, the relevance of this model goes beyond the range of poetic-literary texts as such. Placed in connection with Eugenio Coseriu’s framework of Integral text linguistics as a hermeneutics of sense, Borcilă’s model can serve as a gateway to elucidating the general mechanisms of textual sense construction. Both directly and analogically, it provides noteworthy insights, as well as widely applicable analytical tools for justifying the constitution and articulation of sense in all texts, and can thus help to clarify and develop the respective components of Integral text linguistics. These theoretical and methodological aspects are illustrated with a textual analysis on a hermetic poem by Ion Barbu.

The paper examines Eugenio Coseriu’s project of a “text linguistics as a hermeneutics of sense” on the backdrop of the wider – “integral” – map for the study of language / speaking as a cultural activity. The aims and objectual scope of this type of text linguistics, as well as its limitations and outer limits, i.e. its conceivable interfaces with other disciplines of textuality, in particular with text semiotics and poetics, are discussed from the viewpoint of a critical-constructive question: if / to what extent the conceptual construction envisaged by Coseriu in the latter part of the 20th century is still meaningful, feasible and productive today. The “critical-aesthetic perspective” in the study of speaking as a creative activity proposed by Ana Agud offers clarifying interpretations on several conceptual and methodological points which we hold to be directly relevant for text linguistics; these are used in the course of the discussion in order to shed light on the notion of ‘real (genuine) text’ as the legitimate focus of text-linguistic investigations in a Coserian framework.

The article examines the reception of E. Coseriu’s work on the scene of Japanese linguistics, focusing mainly on Sincronía, diacronía e historia. El problema del cambio lingüístico (1958). The analysis draws on contemporary and subsequent accounts and evaluations by Japanese scholars involved in projects related to Coseriu’s work, corroborated with the backdrop of the socio-cultural and institutional conditions of post-WWII Japanese academia. The analysis serves a twofold objective. First, we document the role played by Coseriu’s theoretical outlook in Japan, from the perspective of a critical history of linguistic ideas, Second, we outline the wider implications of this specific case of reception, arguing that the overarching themes of Sincronía…, in particular the view of language as energeia, the consistent anti-deterministic stance and the emphasis on functional and purpose-oriented explanations, continue to offer productive viewpoints in the current debate on the epistemic positioning of linguistics with regard to other (types of) sciences.

The article starts from the epistemological characterization proposed by D. Copceag for E. Coseriu’s outlook on language, epitomized in the term “linguistic realism”, and examines its possible application in the domain of text linguistics as a hermeneutics of sense, for defining the legitimate object of this discipline and distinguishing it from the ways in which the same material object ‘text’ may be approached in other linguistic disciplines or in other domains of scientific inquiry. Several instances of Coseriu’s own use of the term “realism” in correlation with “functionalism” and “rationalism” are reviewed, with special focus on the “integral typology of real (genuine) languages”, which provides the blueprint of a relevant analogy for the exploration of genuine texts. Finally, an illustrative text analysis helps to highlight the differences between the semantic perspective which is proper to integral text linguistics, from the standpoints of adjacent disciplines, such as a pragmatics of individual texts, or of completely different pursuits, such as sociology, cultural history, marketing etc., where texts are treated as sources of information, being thus reduced to an instrumental status.

[Abstract] The paper examines the principle of the « double semiotic relation » in discourse, which states that, when a text is produced and interpreted, the significations and designations of units belonging to the level of individual languages are assigned the role of signifiers for a second-degree content – textual sense. After a critical review of four representative interpretations of this principle (É. Benveniste, Y Ikegami, P. Charaudeau, F. Rastier), it is argued that a more coherent reformulation is possible within the framework of E. Coseriu's « integral text linguistics », in a hermeneutic perspective, by defining not only a specific type of textual content, but also specific components of textual expression, which, though linguistic in nature, do not coincide with and do not directly derive from idiomatic units and rules.

Lexical chains represent a very powerful base for segmentation and many papers are devoted to this problem. In our study we apply a new method for obtaining the boundaries, a method that relies on the number (weight) of chains which end in a sentence, which begin in the following sentence and which traverse these two successive sentences. The method is successfully experimented and evaluated on ten texts from DUC02 conference both for a set of automated obtained lexical chains and for two sets of human obtained lexical chains (pair to pair and against to the manual segmentation). The method is also evaluated by the summaries provided (by three strategies) using these segmentations.

This paper presents some original methods for text summarization of a single source document by extraction. The methods are based on some of our own text segmentation algorithms. We denote them as logical segmentation because for all these methods (LTT, ArcInt and ArcReal) the score of a sentence is calculated starting from the number of sentences which are entailed by it. For a text (which is a sequence of sentences) the scores form a structure which indicates how the most important sentences alternate with less important ones and organizes the text according to its logical content. The second logical method, Pure Entailment also uses definition of the relation of entailment between two texts. At least to our knowledge, it is for the first time that the relation of Text Entailment between the sentences of a text is used for segmentation and summarization. The third original method applies Dynamic Programming and centering theory to the sentences logically scored as above. The obtained ranked logical segments are used in the summarization. Our methods of segmentation and summarization are applied and evaluated against a manually realized segmentation and summarization of the same text by Donald Richie, "The Koan".