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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    The Digital Tool Pygmalion and its Interactive Maps: Visualising Modal Verbs in the Classroom
    This contribution showcases the free digital tool Pygmalion and its application to the learning/teaching of English modals in both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. This recently developed tool allows users to draw interactive maps of meanings, constructions and semantic relationships without requiring computer skills. While Pygmalion was originally designed to draw diachronic maps of single words (or of etymologically related words), I show how it is possible to draw synchronic maps as well as contrastive maps. After having presented the main features of the tool, I show how Pygmalion can be used to create a synchronic and a diachronic map to compare the modals “can” and “may”, illustrating the procedure step by step. Thanks to its user-friendly design, Pygmalion can be used by teachers, pupils, students not only in a classroom context, but also for autonomous learning.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    From Static to Interactive Maps: Drawing Diachronic Maps of (Latin) Modality with Pygmalion
    In this paper, we present the diachronic maps of a selection of 75 Latin modal markers designed through the tool Pygmalion. Both the maps and Pygmalion were conceived in the framework of the WoPoss project, which aims at analysing the diachronic pathways of modality in Latin. While the description of the tool and its functionalities is beyond the scope of this paper, we focus here on the description of our diachronic modal maps. Using visualisations to represent semantic shifts is a well-known practice in some linguistic fields such as typology and lexicography, and they have already been applied to modality. Though the situation is rapidly evolving, typological semantic maps as well as lexicographic maps are still for the most part static and usually not-interactive visualisations. Our modal maps stand out not only for their interactivity, but also for the richness of the information conveyed: chronology, etymology, semantics, syntax, first attestation and diachronic relationships between the meanings. After presenting our conceptual framework for modality, we illustrate the process of conceptualisation and development of our diachronic maps of modality. More specifically, we explain how we gathered and organised the data in order to transpose it into a visual representation. We then showcase the map of possum as an example of our results. Subsequently, we discuss the results with respect to previous literature concerning both visualisation of modal evolution from a general point of view and the investigation of modality in Latin. Finally, we outline possible applications within and beyond the WoPoss project.