Identifying Component Discourse Processes Reading—from works to multiple texts (pp. 147-159). Reading is a complex task and it is accomplished by several interactive levels of skills, starting from phonological, lexical and syntactic analyses and extending to propositionalization (Perfetti & Britt, 1995) and intra-sentence integration/discourse-levels (Mason & Just 2004), which involve cognitiv...

Semanticists have demonstrated repeatedly over the past twenty years that intonation often conveys information important for determining the content of a discourse. For example, intonation is important for marking focus in English, which in turn is important for interpreting sentences with focus sensitive adverbs like even and only (Beaver and Clark 2003). Intonation is also important in markin...

In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punct...

Discourse comprehension is a hallmark of human social behaviour and refers to the act of interpreting a written or spoken message by constructing mental representations that integrate incoming language with prior knowledge and experience. Here, we report a human lesion study (n = 145) that investigates the neural mechanisms underlying discourse comprehension (measured by the Discourse Comprehen...

Although Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been developing rapidly, it faces strong criticism from scholars due to its lack of attention to the cognitive aspects of discourse. As a fundamental cognitive tool to conceptualize the world, metaphor plays a vital role in constructing social reality. Providing a particular perspective of viewing the reality, metaphor forms an important part of id...

Since the 1980s, the functions of non-traditional LIKE have been extensively examined (Romaine and Lange, 1991; Dailey O’Cain, 2000; Fuller, 2003; D’Arcy, 2005). Functions of LIKE have most commonly been positioned in two subgroups—a discourse introducing or quotative LIKE (Romaine and Lange, 1991), and a discourse (also, pragmatic, focuser) LIKE (Underhill, 1988; Andersen, 2001; D’Arcy, 2005)....

Abstract. D-LTAG is a discourse-level extension of Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG), in which discourse syntax is projected by different types of discourse connectives and discourse interpretation is a product of compositional rules, anaphora resolution, and inference. In this paper, we present a D-LTAG extension of ongoing work on an LTAG syntaxsemantic interface. First, we show how p...

Forms of Japanese referring expressions are mainly divided into four types: bare NPs, demonstrative NPs (i.e. either as determiner or as pronoun) and zero pronouns. Out of the four types of the referring expressions, bare NPs are the most common type as a subsequent mention and zero pronouns are used only in limited conditions. Based on the centering framework, the results suggest that the cent...

We present results of a series of machine learning experiments that address the classification of the discourse function of single affirmative cue words such as alright, okay and mm-hm in a spoken dialogue corpus. We suggest that a simple discourse/sentential distinction is not sufficient for such words and propose two additional classification sub-tasks: identifying (a) whether such words conv...

Discourse markers ('cue words') are lexical items that signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans; for example, because, since, and for this reason are different markers for causal relations. Discourse markers are a syntactically quite heterogeneous group of words, many of which are traditionally treated as function words belonging to the realm of grammar rather t...