In this study, Van Dijk’s (1998) model of CDA was utilized in order to examine the representation of Iran’s nuclear program in editorials published by British news casting companies. The analysis of the editorials was carried out at two levels of headlines and full text stories with regard to the linguistic features of lexical choices, nominalization, passivization, overcompleteness, and voice....

Three fundamental systems of communication are defined: information, explanation and imagination. Information is based on analytic distinctions between objects in the world. Explanatory communication provides knowledge through discourse, narration, logic, rhetoric and other forms of systemic elaboration. Intellectual discovery relies on a third system of communication, that of imagination. Rath...

Involvement of medical technologies in healthcare encounters calls for a critical analysis of the communicative expertise of healthcare personnel dealing with the technology while communicating with patients. This paper explores how a discourse analytic approach, activity analysis, is fruitful when identifying what characterizes human interaction involving medical technologies. The paper sugges...

In an effort to develop measures of discourse level management strategies, this study examines a measure of the degree to which decisionmaking interactions consist of sequences of utterance functions that are linked in a decisionmaking routine. The measure is applied to 100 dyadic interactions elicited in both face-to-face and computer-mediated environments with systematic variation of task com...

We describe two constraint-based methods that can be used to improve the recall of a shallow discourse parser based on conditional random field chunking. These method uses a set of natural structural constraints as well as others that follow from the annotation guidelines of the Penn Discourse Treebank. We evaluated the resulting systems on the standard test set of the PDTB and achieved a rebal...

Annotated data is an important resource for the linguistics community, which is why researchers need to be sure that such data are reliable. However, arriving at sufficiently reliable annotations appears to be an issue within the field of discourse, possibly due to the fact that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a textual one. In this paper, we discuss recent insights and development...

The present study extends previous results demonstrating a relation between maternal discourse and child social understanding to include paternal discourse. Emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were considered as two distinctive aspects of social understanding. Participants were 106 children (54 boys and 52 girls) studied at 3.5 and 5 years. Discourse measures came from separate ...

We establish the following characteristics of the task of perspective classification: (a) using term frequencies in a document does not improve classification achieved with absence/presence features; (b) for datasets allowing the relevant comparisons, a small number of top features is found to be as effective as the full feature set and indispensable for the best achieved performance, testifyin...

the present research aimed at investigating the interaction of the classroom talk to have a better understanding of the teachers’ practice teaching which can pave the way for reflection on teaching. the study benefitted from conversation analytic perspective to qualitatively and interpretively examine the classroom discourse of the teacher-learner interaction. the classroom talk was analyzed th...

BACKGROUND Models of basal ganglia (BG) function suggest that expressive language deficits will likely and consistently present in BG disease. Disparities currently exist between the predictions of models of BG function in expressive language and data from studies of BG disease. Traditional expressive language assessment methodologies that emphasize measures of language form (word and sentence ...