Children encounter metaphor in all aspects of their daily lives, including the spoken and written discourse of school, and metaphor can be one of the routes through which socio-cultural norms are appropriated. The use of metaphor seems to be a basic human skill, which develops in interaction with developing world knowledge and linguistic skills. Both use of metaphor and the development of metap...

The macro-target of discourse interpretation for computational purposes is the automatic detection of events in a text and their ordering in a temporal scale. Asher and Lascarides’ (2003) ideas on the semantics-pragmatics interface between the lexical and discourse level along with the logic mechanism for inferring rhetorical structure (often nonmonotonically) proposes an interesting way of ach...

From a discourse perspective, utterances may vary in at least two important respects: (i) they can occupy a different hierarchical position in a larger-scale information unit and (ii) they can represent different types of speech acts. Spoken language systems will improve if they adequately take into account both discourse segmentation and utterance purpose. An important question then is how suc...

The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the relation between information structure and discourse structure. It presents an account of the German conjunct adverb doch (dochCA) that is based on the observation that the interaction between the two structures determines the semantic and pragmatic properties of this conjunct adverb. The account of dochCA presented thus defends a monosemic...

the foundation of most intellectual discourse is western-centric to the exclusion of other views. this includes ideal patterns of social interaction, preference for aesthetic, accepted norms and values, and the concepts of dignity, respectability, morality and ethics. such a position is culturally myopic. western cultural influence colors all of them including moral precepts. the assumption is ...

The goal of this study was to investigate the kinds of discourse goals that Iranian EFL learners perceive as the most probable reasons behind the utterance of figurative language, metaphors and similes, with reference to 4 independent variables of Figure Type (Metaphor or Simile), Tenor Concreteness (Concrete or Abstract), Context (List Format or Story), and Modality (Oral, Written, and Both). ...

This thesis is an investigation of phenomena at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with the aim of arguing for a view of semantic interpretation as lexicallydriven yet contextually dependent. I examine regular, generative processes which operate over the lexicon to induce verbal sense shifts, and discuss the interaction of these processes with the linguistic or discourse c...