How do we know when critical terms lose their power? Could it be that some of the fundamental notions of literary and cultural studies have been adopted so broadly in so many contexts and disciplines that they explain too much, and thus not enough? This is true for terms such as textuality, discourse, narrative, and representation, some of our colleagues have claimed. If critical terms originat...

Discourse analysis is increasingly becoming a methodology of preference amongst qualitative researchers. There is a danger, however, of it being viewed as a bounded and uncontested domain of research practice. As discourse analysis is inextricably linked with theoretical issues, it is a dynamic practice that is constantly in a process of revision. In this paper I reflect on some of the conceptu...

Analysis of speech acts and discourse structures is essential to a dialogue understanding system because speech acts and discourse structures are closely tied with the speaker’s intention. However, it has been difficult to infer a speech act and a discourse structure from a surface utterance because they highly depend on the context of the utterance. We propose a statistical dialogue analysis m...

Recently, Chinese implicit discourse relation recognition has attracted more and more attention, since it is crucial to understand the Chinese discourse text. In this paper, we propose a novel memory augmented attention model which represents the arguments using an attention-based neural network and preserves the crucial information with an external memory network which captures each discourse ...

Aiming at highlighting the important role of print media discourse in the implicit  transfer of  the dominant ideology of discourse context, the present data-driven paper demonstrates  how the lexical features of repetition and synonymy as well as the structural and thematic features of passivization, nominalization and predicated theme were utilized by the discourse producers to mediate betwee...