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) ...

In this paper we will present our ongoing work on a plan-based discourse processor developed in the context of the Enthusiast Spanish to English translation system as part of the JANUS multilingual speech-to-speech translation system. We will demonstrate that theories of discourse which postulate a strict tree structure of discourse on either the intentional or attentional level are not totally...

Abstract Two self-paced reading time experiments investigated the application of the semantic theories of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp 1981; see also, Heim 1982) and Modal Subordination (Roberts 1987, 1989) as the basis for a model of discourse processing. The results of Experiment 1 support the empirical contrast as described by Roberts (1987, 1989), that is, that intersentential anap...

From a multimodal point of view, the functions which have generally been attributed to linguistic elements of discourse (known, as a rule, as discourse markers or connectors within the several discourse analytic theories) can also be fulfilled by prosody and nonverbal units. These types of discourse functions, here called interactive conversational signals, a subgroup of the conversational sign...

Kaplanian, two-dimensional theories secure rigidity for indexicals by positing special contexts and semantic mechanisms reserved only for indexicals. The result is a deep and unexplained chasm between expressions that depend on the extra-linguistic context and expressions that depend on the discourse context. Theories that treat indexicals as anaphoric, presuppositional expressions (e.g. Hunter...

From a multimodal point of view, the functions which have generally been attributed to linguistic elements of discourse (known, as a rule, as discourse markers or connectors within the several discourse analytic theories) can also be fulfilled by prosody and nonverbal units. These types of discourse functions, here called interactive conversational signals, a subgroup of the conversational sign...

Discourse structure is reflected by a number of global prosodic parameters, like for example pause duration and pitch range. Discourse structure is also known to affect the accessibility/salience of antecedents of anaphoric expressions. Assuming these generalizations are correct, one can ask whether listeners use the information encoded in pauses and pitch range to resolve anaphoric references ...

China is a country that is arousing a large amount of interest as a new mega-market, as it opens itself to a market-orientated economy and expands at a remarkable rate. However, the influx of international investment, new business opportunities and advertising from overseas has seen Chinese consumers being exposed to potentially offensive advertising products and images. While some products and...

Traditional semantic theories assume that meaning arises from the syntactic combination of amodal symbols processed by a modular subsystem. This idea has two striking implications: first, sensory-motor experience has no relevance in language processing; secondly, since the domain of syntactic rules is the sentence, linguistic interpretation takes place in a two-step fashion such that discourse-...