Contrary to Sperber and Wilson (1986), I argue that relevance cannot be the only principle that governs human communication. It can by no means replace current accounts of discourse coherence (e.g., Grice, 1975; van Dijk, 1977; Giora, 1985a,b, 1988), since it is neither necessary nor sufficient for text well-formedness. I show that, although a discourse may be relevant to an individual, interac...

This article addresses the question, How do changes in policy discourses shape public representations of literacy learners and the goals of adult literacy education? It examines specifically how the agency of adult literacy learners is constructed. We carry out a critical discourse analysis of two key adult literacy policy documents from the U.K.: the manifesto A Right to Read (British Associat...

Due to the great gap between the official “nation” (minzu 民族) discourse-policy goals of the Chinese government and the social realities of ethnic relations in China, it is necessary for the leadership, academics, and the public in China to review the historical process involved in creating the “nationality” discourse dynamics of the past century. Chinese need to understand the nature of “nation...

Introduction Grosz and Sidner (1990) have argued that discourses are primarily examples of collaborative activity , and hence that a model of plans for discourse must deal adequately with collaboration. In particular, it must provide a means of representing and distinguishing among agents' beliefs and of stating the ways in which the intentions of diier-ent agents contribute to achieving their ...

BACKGROUND Professional competence is important in delivering high quality patient care, and it can be enhanced by reflection and reflective discourse e.g. in mentoring groups. However, students are often reluctant though to engage in this discourse. A group mentoring program involving all preclinical students as well as faculty members and co-mentoring clinical students was initiated at Witten...

In an ordinary interaction, communicants have various, mostly unconscious goals which reflect their interactional, social and personal needs. these interactions, people’s minds try to find a balance between reaching consuming cognitive energy. If speaker puts too little effort into speech production, she risks not achieving her communicative goals. This is especially typical when the atmosphere...

The paper summarizes an ongoing investigation of the discourse planning tasks concerned with the se-quencing of utterances and their parts. Content selection provides some important constraints on sequencing, most notably those derived from the preconditions and eeects of planning operators. However these operators underconstrain sequencing, especially below the granularity at which they interf...

Social deliberative skills are collaborative life-skills. These skills are crucial for communicating in any collaborative processes where participants have heterogeneous opinions and perspectives driven by different assumptions, beliefs, and goals. In this paper, we describe models using lexical, discourse, and gender demographic features to identify whether or not participants demonstrate soci...

This paper describes the goals, design and results of a shared task on the automatic linguistic annotation of German language data from genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC), social media interactions and Web corpora. The two subtasks of tokenization and part-of-speech tagging were performed on two data sets: (i) a genuine CMC data set with samples from several CMC genres, and (ii) a ...