The paper presents a corpus-based information-structural analysis of the German discourse particles aber and auch in the so-called post-initial position, i.e. between the pre-field constituent and the finite verb in main clauses. Based on corpus data, I argue that aber and auch in this position mark the boundary between the focus and the background of the sentence that hosts them. By doing this...

Discourse particles and discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are intriguing objects of study, as they promise the researcher ready access to the very fabric of talk-inprogress. They can occur as lexical equivalents or complements of more elusive gestural or intonational cues that subtly guide and modulate the participants’ understanding, or they can saliently signal relations between utterances o...

background considering the cognitive and linguistic complexity of discourse production, it is expected that individuals with traumatic brain injury (tbi) should face difficulties in this task. therefore, clinical examination of discourse has become a useful tool for studying and assessment of communication skills of people suffering from tbi. among different genres of discourse, persuasive disc...

This dissertation research involves implementing a computer system that, given a natural language dialogue, will automatically tag each utterance with a discourse label (a concise abstraction of the intentional function of the speaker) and a discourse pointer (a focusing mechanism that represents the dialogue context in which an utterance is to be understood). (Samuel 1996) Since the discourse ...

Edward Said is regarded as the originator of colonial discourse theory. He deploys Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse to accomplish his project in Orientalism and emphasizes Foucault’s notion of discourse and its relation to power, rendering discourse a carceral system. Although Said explicitly expresses the similarity between Orientalism and Foucault’s discourse theory, it seems he...

BACKGROUND In medical literature, several principles that define 'good consultations' have been outlined. These principles tend to be prescriptive in nature, overlooking the complexity of general practitioners (GPs)' perspectives of everyday practice. Focusing on perspectives might be particularly relevant, since they may affect decisions and actions. Therefore, the present study adopts a botto...

Discourse markers ('cue words') are lexical items that signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans; for example, because, since, and for this reason are different markers for causal relations. Discourse markers are a syntactically quite heterogeneous group of words, many of which are traditionally treated as function words belonging to the realm of grammar rather t...

in this paper attempts have been made to study the discourses dominating political islam to answer these questions: how can one categorize these diverse political islam discourses? what are the similarities and differences among these discourses in general, and with the islamic revolution discourse in particular? the research methodology employed for this study is historical-comparative and the...

We present a connectionist model for the interpretation of discourse particles in real dialogues that is based on neuronal principles of categorization (categorical perception, prototype formation, contextual interpretation). It can be shown that discourse particles operate just like other morphological and lexical items with respect to interpretation processes. The description proposed locates...