A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant interjections and of back-channel utterances. These expressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless, spurious expressions. On the basis of the analysis of spoken dialogue corpus, we claim that these utterances...

Quantifiers are ubiquitous in natural language and, in addition to providing information about quantity, they serve important discourse functions. We outline several theoretical accounts of the functions that quantifiers perform in a discourse and the factors governing their interpretation, focusing on two specific topics that have received substantial attention from researchers working in ling...

Organism and environment are in a state of constant interaction, and discourse is viewed as one form of manifestation of this interaction. Through the study of discourse insights can be gained into those components that bring about mental events. Verbal structure, communication of beliefs and action/interaction are highly interactive dimensions of discourse. Taking this perspective as a framewo...

This paper studies how subjectivity in capitalist culture can be characterized. Building on Lacan's later seminars XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX, the author first outlines Lacan's general discourse theory, which includes four characteristic discourses: the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst. Next, the author explo...

In an effort to develop measures of discourse level management strategies, this study examines a measure of the degree to which decisionmaking interactions consist of sequences of utterance functions that are linked in a decisionmaking routine. The measure is applied to 100 dyadic interactions elicited in both face-to-face and computer-mediated environments with systematic variation of task com...

discourse analysis attempts as methodology to discover the interactions of language with intellectual-social structures within written and oral texts, as well as to study the meaning formation in relation to intralingistic and cross-linguistic factors. in other words, the conditions of meaningfulness are called discourse. this method has been achieved as the outcome of studies conducted by scho...

Airong Wang, Mid-Sweden University This paper reports on a task-based language teaching course in Second Life. The data set consists of transcribed recordings and a teacher interview. Focusing on how the teacher facilitated student participation, this paper aims to explore the discourse functions in the teacher language output and then to address the teacher roles in three different task phases...

Comparing English and Finnish, and simplifying a complex issue very much, we can say that English has fixed word order and Finnish has free word order. Syntactic theories such as HPSG (Sag and Wasow, 1999) have provided relatively successful descriptions of English, using a phrase structure approach to capture generalizations about fixed word order. Software tools such as LKB (Copestake, 2000) ...

A dedicated resource, consisting of annotated speech data, tools, and workflow design, was developed for the detailed investigation of discourse phenomena in Taiwan Mandarin. The discourse phenomena have functions which are associated with positions in utterances, and temporal properties, and include discourse markers (‘NAGE’, ’NA’, e.g. ‘hesitation’, ‘utterance initiation’), discourse particle...