The purpose of this article is to investigate the similarities and differences in the usage of discourse markers such as because, so, and, etc. among the following three types of university students: native speakers of English (NS), non-native Chinese students (CNNS, mainland Chinese), and non-native Japanese students (JNNS). All the CNNS and JNNS have studied English as a foreign language for ...

Discourse markers, a group of pragmatic elements, are used widely in our daily communication. Among these markers, well is found to be the most frequently used one in conversation. Although much research has been carried out on its theoretical bases such as its definition, functions and categorizations, few studies have taken a multimodal approach in analyzing this marker. The aim of the presen...

An unprecedented combination of simulative and metaphor-based reasoning about beliefs is achieved in an AI system, ATT-Meta. Much mundane discourse about beliefs uses conceptual metaphors (e.g., MIND AS CONTAINER) productively, and ATT-Meta's metaphor-based reasoning accordingly leads to crucial discourse comprehension decisions. ATT-Meta's non-metaphorical mode of belief reasoning includes sim...

This discussion note deals with the reformulation markers (RMs) that is, that is to say, in other words, namely, i.e. and viz. and the role they play in linguistic communication as described by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995). According to Blakemore (1996), items such as that is (to say) and in other words are conceptual and non-truth conditional. This fact makes her conclude that classifying th...

this paper examines translating free indirect discourse (fid) in three persian translations of woolf's to the lighthouse. first, it is referred to narrative discourse and the linguistic markers of fid as well as its effects and functions briefly. then, translating fid in three hoseini's, bejanian's and keyhan's translations of woolf's novel is analyzed, through comparin...

Discourse markers are an important means to signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans. Research on generating discourse markers has been mainly concerned with causal markers, whereas temporal markers have not received much attention. In this paper, we identify semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features that are required to support a motivated choice of German tem...

Distinguishing between paradigmatic relations such as synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy is an important prerequisite in a range of NLP applications. In this paper, we explore discourse relations as an alternative set of features to lexico-syntactic patterns. We demonstrate that statistics over discourse relations, collected via explicit discourse markers as proxies, can be utilized as salient in...

Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have...

Usage of discourse markers in tutorial language can make the difference between stilted and natural sounding dialogue. In this paper we describe some simple rules for selection of discourse markers. These rules were derived for use in an intelligent tutoring system by applying decision-tree machine learning to human tutoring language. The fact that these selection rules operate within the envir...