In this paper I propose that the principles of Emergent Grammar (Hopper 1987, 1998) can be applied to lexical semantics. I discuss three instances of discourse semantics to show why an emergent view of semantics can provide a realistic account of semantics in discourse. The three cases are: 1) emergence and negotiation of meaning due to participant interaction in discourse; 2) (re)distribution ...

This study examines the nature of the discourse of advertising. The focus is on consumer advertising, which is directed towards the promotion of some product or service to the general public. The study, however, is not meant to exhaust all the aspects of this particular discourse, or present an answer to all the problems it poses. Rather, it aims at uncovering the basic elements of the most per...

This article examines the effects of age, cognition, and discourse skills on the clinical manifestations of formal thought disorder in 31 children with schizophrenia, 14 with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), and 70 who were normal. The communication deficits of the 31 children with schizophrenia have three characteristics: illogical thinking, loose associations, and impaired discourse sk...

The compositionality of meaning extends beyond the single sentence. Just as words combine to form the meaning of sentences, so do sentences combine to form the meaning of paragraphs, dialogues and general discourse. We introduce both a sentence model and a discourse model corresponding to the two levels of compositionality. The sentence model adopts convolution as the central operation for comp...

This paper details a software architecture for discourse processing in spoken dialogue systems, where the three component tasks of discourse processing are (1) Dialogue Management, (2) Context Tracking, and (3) Pragmatic Adaptation. We define these three component tasks and describe their roles in a complex, near-future scenario in which multiple humans interact with each other and with compute...

This paper is concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of teenagers, taken from a newly developed specialised corpus the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (BATTICC). More specifically, the study employs a discourse analytical approach to examine vague language in an intercultural context among a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, paying particul...

This text presents a cognitive-psychology analysis of spontaneous, co-speech gestures in a face-to-face architectural design meeting (A1 in DTRS7). The long-term objective is to formulate specifications for remote collaborative-design systems, especially for supporting the use of different semiotic modalities (multi-modal interaction). According to their function for design, interaction, and co...

Recent communicative approaches have suggested that one goal of English language teaching should be to replicate 'genuine' or 'natural' rather than 'typical' or 'traditional' classroom communication. This article argues that such a goal is both paradoxical and unattainable, and that there are serious flaws in the assumptions underlying the communicative orthodoxy concerning ELT classroom intera...

This paper investigates prosodic exceptions to rightmost stress in English nested foci. We concentrate on sentences involving discourse-novel material, where the absence of rightmost stress cannot follow from the discourse-given status of the relevant rightmost constituent. We show that these cases cannot be accounted for by an analysis directly linking pitch accents to focus projections via F-...

We are working on representing discourse in a system that we want to support mixed initiative interaction. The basis for this discussion is the authors' work on a system for helping students understand the reasoning behind decision-support systems that use statistical information. The project involves taking an existing system, Banter (Haddawy, Jacobson, & Jr. 1996), in which control of the int...