Discourse prominence: Definition and application

Discourse Prominence and Movement Constructions

One of the key requirements in understanding a text is deciding how successive utterances relate to one another. Anaphors help in this respect by picking out entities already existing in the discourse and indicating the referent to which the new information encoded in the utterance should be attached. Sometimes, the interpretation of an anaphor is determined entirely by the morphosyntactic feat...

Discourse Prominence and Pe - marking in Romanian

Referential expressions are used to introduce and continue reference to entities with par ticular referential properties, but also with particular discourse properties. In this paper we investigate the referential and discourse properties of pemarked indefi nite direct objects in Romanian, which are an instance of Diff erential Object Marking (DOM). Pe -marking is generally obligatory for defi ...

Prominence and Phrasing in Spoken Discourse Processing

We review psycholinguistic research on the use of intonation in dialogue, focusing on our own recent work. In experiments using complex real-world tasks and naïve speakers and listeners, we show that speakers reliably specific prosodic cues to signal their intensions, and that listeners use these cues to recognize syntactic and pragmatic aspects of discourse meaning.

Specificity , Referentiality and Discourse Prominence : German

There are various notions of specificity, ranging from Fodor & Sag’s (1982) referentiality view to Givón’s (1983) discourse prominence view. Ionin (2006) discusses the relation between these two perspectives by analyzing the English indefinite this. She represents indefinite this as a referential operator in the sense of Fodor & Sag (1982), but also adds the felicity condition of “noteworthines...

Perception of discourse boundaries and prominence in spontaneous Dutch speech1