The present study is an attempt to investigate the use of vague expressions by intermediate EFL learners. More specifically, the current study focuses on the structures and functions of one of the most common categories of vague language, i.e. general extenders. The data include a 22-hour corpus of English-as-a-foreign-language conversations. A comparison is also made between this corpus and a...

In this article, I argue that neither of the two main approaches to definiteness, familiarity or unique identifiability, provide necessary or sufficient conditions for the use of the definite article in English. I propose instead that the basic meaning of the article is to signal the accessibility of a discourse referent, more specifically, the availability of an access path through a configura...

We present results of a series of machine learning experiments that address the classification of the discourse function of single affirmative cue words such as alright, okay and mm-hm in a spoken dialogue corpus. We suggest that a simple discourse/sentential distinction is not sufficient for such words and propose two additional classification sub-tasks: identifying (a) whether such words conv...

To engage in discourse, a participant must map the discourse functions he or she wants to achieve into surface level realizations. These mappings are often treated as rule-based and general in work on discourse and computational discourse. Here, I demonstrate a proof-of-concept system that learns such mappings stochastically in a reinforcement learning paradigm. Learning these mapping has the a...

The present study investigates how advice writers employ move sequences and modal verbs to achieve intended discourse functions. This paper aims to testify two research hypotheses: 1. Advice writers of different topics employ different moves and modal verbs to achieve discourse function, and 2. The differences may imply writers’ intentions, emotion and expectancy of effects on the readers to in...

Combination of grammatical roles in relative clauses (RC) is determined by a multitude of factors (Fox and Thompson 1990, Pu 2007, Ming and Chen 2009). This study shows that four factors (discourse functions of RCs, grounding mechanism, information status, and animacy of head nouns) interact with one another to determine which combination is favored in a Chinese discourse. 1. Introduction The p...

The paper presents a novel type of fuzzy sets, called time-Varying Fuzzy Sets (VFS). These fuzzy sets are based on the Gaussian membership functions, they are depended on the error and they are characterized by the displacement of the kernels to both right and left side of the universe of discourse, the two extremes kernels of the universe are fixed for all time. In this work we focus only on t...

Introduction Most current formal theories of discourse incorporate some insight concerning the contribution of aspect to discourse structure, and many draw upon Hans Kamp’s analysis of the aspectual contribution of tenses, as well as Vlach’s notion of tenses as aspect-shift operators (cf. Vlach 1981). Thus, Kamp & Rohrer (1983) argue that the French imparfait acts as a ‘stativizer’, mapping non...