Text analysis from the point of view of text grammars
| There are some news (September 7th, 2026): Some months before we mentioned that there was a new semantic tagger that would replace the one implemented here in Text·a·gram. Well, it turns out that we have yet another one, now called ``Wikacho'' (with a k). This new device combines the previous two and is therefore based on both Wiktionary and Wikipedia. We will soon integrate this tagger here, but in the meantime, but if you want to check it out visit its own website: http://www.tecling.com/wikacho. Right now it only works with texts in Spanish, though. The English version is still in preparation. |
ANALYSIS OF DEIXIS
This function is at the moment only available in Spanish.
The tagging of deixis allows you to find, classify and tag deictics (textual markers through which deixis acts) in a given text. These tags are differentiated by colour, visual markers such as underlining and bolding, and their respective categorisation in brackets to the right of the marked deictic.
Deixis
Deictics (or shifters) are elements of the text that refer to the circumstances of the utterance, i.e. the communicative context: the ‘here and now’ of the message, as well as the ‘I and you’ of the sender and the receiver (Lozano, Peña-Marín and Abril, 1989; Renkema, 1999; Cuenca, 2010). Based on these, deictics are classified as spatial, temporal and personal.
Spatial deictics are elements that demonstrate the space of the utterance. They are words whose meaning depends on the place where the text is written. Temporal deictics are markers of temporality that refer to the time when the discourse was uttered. Finally, personal deictics are first- and second-person markers, as they only highlight the people related to the sender and the receiver, and not the third parties referred to.
Deictics can only acquire full meaning when the when, where, and by whom of the particular occurrence to which they refer is known. In other words, deictics are composed of ‘empty words,’ so both personal, spatial, and temporal deictics rely on resources such as personal and demonstrative pronouns to refer to the specific situation.
Some examples of person or actant deixis are the markers “I” (the speaker) and “you” (the receiver). Examples of place deixis include “these”, “that”, “here” and “there”, and examples of temporal deixis include adverbs of time such as “today”, “now”, etc.
References
Calsamiglia, H. & Tusón, A. (1999). Las cosas del decir. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel.
Cuenca, M. J. (2010). Gramática del texto. Madrid: Arco libros.
Lozano, J., Peña-Marín, C. y Abril, G. (1989). Análisis del discurso: Hacia una semiótica de la interacción textual. Madrid: Cátedra.
Renkema, J. (1999). Introducción a los estudios sobre el discurso. Barcelona: Gedisa.
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This is another project by Tecling.com
Publications
About the semantic tagger
The version of the semantic tagger currently implemented in
Text·a·gram is the first one, called Tatatag, from 2025, which is the tagger based on Wiktionary. This version is described on the following paper:
• Nazar, R. (2026). Semantic Typing for Corpus Pattern Analysis. International Journal of Lexicography, vol. 39, 2026, ecag012.
Later (2026), we developed Wicacho, a new version of the tagger that uses Wikipedia (http://www.tecling.com/wicacho). This sencond version is described in another paper:
• Nazar, R.; Renau, I. (2026). Wikipedia used as a semantic tagger: some preliminary results in Spanish. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, n. 76, p. 279-292.
Now (September 7, 2026) we have a third version (Wikacho: http://www.tecling.es/wikacho) that combines both approaches integrating Wiktionary and Wikipedia. No paper has been published about it yet, but we are preparing some documentation on the website.
Publications about the rest of the functions in Text·a·gram
• Nazar, R. (2024). Statistical modeling of discourse genres: the case of the opinion column in Spanish. SN Computer Science 5(959):1-11.
• Nazar, R.; Renau, I.; Robledo, H. (2024). Dismark and Text·a·Gram: Automatic identification and categorization of discourse markers in texts. In: Cecilia-Mihaela Popescu & Oana-Adriana Dut,ă (eds.), Discourse Markers in Romance Languages. Crosslinguistic Approaches in Romance and Beyond. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Concept and development: Rogelio Nazar
Collaborators: Javier Obreque, Diego Sánchez, Hernán Robledo, Paolo Caballería, Nicolás Acosta, Scarlette Gatica, Andrea Alcaíno, Ignacio Lobos and Irene Renau.
Documentation: Andrea Alcaíno & Rogelio Nazar