This is a first attempt at describing word order variation in the early Germanic languages in a dynamic model of discourse relations as outlined in the Segmented Discourse Relation Theory SDRT by Asher and Lascarides (2003). The study aims at investigating the interrelation between information structure and discourse organisation in the text of the Old High German Tatian translation (9 century)...

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...

In this paper, we address one of the central problems in text generation: the missing link ("the generation gap" in Meteer's terms) between the global discourse organization as often provided by text planning modules and the linguistic realization of this organization. We argue that the link should be established by the lexical choice proces s using resources derived from Mel'~uk's Lezical Func...

Metaphor is, in essence, mapping from the target domain to the source domain; from the familiar and concrete to the unfamiliar and abstract. When this happens, the entailments of metaphors as well as the contextual information will be integrated into texts and hence form coherent texts. Thus, it is accessible for us to explore discourse cohesion and coherence from the point view of conceptual m...

Recently, studies on spoken language in real-life contexts increased dramatically. As a result, some of the features previously considered „empty‟, „superfluous‟ and redundantsuch as sort of, y‟know and well (Goddard and Meanpatterson, 2000, p. 98) now are considered as crucial aspects of interpersonal communication. These expressions called „discourse markers‟ (Schiffrin, 1987) or „pragmatic e...

Recent studies on the analysis of intonational function examine a r a n ~ of materials from cue phrases in monologue (Litman and Hirschberg, 1990) and dialogue (Hirschberg and Litman, 1987; Hockey, 1991) to longer utterances in both monologue and dialogue (McLemore, 1991). Results match specific intonational tunes to certain discourse functions which are more or less well defined. Although thes...

This paper discusses the discourse behavior of Chinese causal connectives yinwei "becauseand suoyi "so" from the perspective of grammaticalization, and claims that the underlying motivation for such is coherence, which involves pragmatic and cognitive interpretation. We claim that the majority of yinwei and suoyi are used pragmatically, and they are grammaticalized. This grammaticalization of d...

This article deals with Finnish discourse oriented word-order variations, and provides their implementation in the HPSG-style typed feature structure grammar using the LKB toolkit (Copestake, 2002). It does not present a full-coverage Finnish grammar or even a small HPSG fragment of the standard syntactic phenomena in Finnish. Rather, the aim has been to implement the Finnish discourse configur...

The present study aims at proving that yalla ‘hurry’ is a discourse marker in Jordanian Spoken Arabic (henceforth, JSA). It also investigates the textual functions of different contexts. data consisted 104 scenarios, including JSA yalla. researchers relied mainly on observation to collect needed for study. A panel four raters, who were professors linguistics, tested validity data. Moreover, gro...