In mindfulness and meditation instructional contexts, conceptual metaphor is a powerful facilitator of intersubjective communication about inner events first-person experiences. Previous studies in discourse have described space as productive source domain that used by teachers to characterise metaphorically abstract concepts related the meditative practice (Silvestre-López 2019, 2020). This st...

This paper targets an understanding of how metadiscourse functions in spoken language. Starting from a metadiscourse taxonomy, a set of TED talks is annotated via crowdsourcing and then a lexical grade level predictor is used to map the distribution of the distinct discourse functions of the taxonomy across levels. The paper concludes showing how speakers use these functions in presentational s...

The present study is targeted to investigate how pitch reset as a boundary correlate functions in indicating structural information in discourse for listeners. Two experiments were conducted: one was a boundary detection test, and the other was a boundary hierarchy rating test. Results of both experiments indicated that listeners indeed rely on the presence and the strength of pitch reset in de...

We present a discourse model integrated with a case-based reasoning dialogue system which learns from experience. The discourse model is capable of solving references, manage sub dialogues and respect turn takings in a dialogue in natural language. The framework is flexible enough not to disturb the learning functions, but allows dynamic changes to a large extent. The system is tested in a traf...

The Japanese discourse particles (sentencefinal particles) ne and yone both have the functions that can be roughly characterized as the ⟨shared information⟩ use and the ⟨call for confirmation⟩ use. In the literature, an adequate descriptive analysis has not been obtained as to how the choice between the two particles is made. This paper aims to clarify discourse conditions under which ne and yo...

Agreement is normally defined as an asymmetric dependency whose realization proceeds (i) in a subject-toverb direction and (ii) independently from the thematic and discourse functions of the elements involved. In this work, I review some experimental data from Spanish and Italian showing that the directionality of agreement is not as rigid as assumed in standard models and that the comprehensio...

We present a discourse model integrated with a case-based reasoning dialogue system which learns from experience. The discourse model is capable of solving references, manage sub dialogues and respect the current topic in a dialogue in natural language. The framework is flexible enough not to disturb the learning functions, but allows dynamic changes to a large extent. The system is tested in a...

Agreement is normally defined as an asymmetric dependency whose realization proceeds (i) in a subject-toverb direction and (ii) independently from the thematic and discourse functions of the elements involved. In this work, I review some experimental data from Spanish and Italian showing that the directionality of agreement is not as rigid as assumed in standard models and that the comprehensio...

Discourse processing depends on long-term semantic memory and discourse memory (i.e. the organization and maintenance of a mental model). Using event-related potentials, the information-processing functions of the activities manifested by a centroparietal negativity (N400) and a posterior positivity (P600) were investigated during the processing of inferences. On the basis of findings from sema...