The large-scale adoption of computer mediated communication technologies has resulted in what has been described as “mass interaction”, shared discourse between hundreds, thousands or more individuals. A number of theoretical papers have made the argument that because of the existence of various technological and psychological constraints, the forms that mass interaction takes, can, partly be u...

Film discourse is a typical of multimodal discourse which contains many semiotic modalities such as image, text, sound and music. Multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) focuses on how meaning is made through the use of multiple modes of communication as opposed to just language. The MDA assisted film discourse analysis helps understand films through the interaction among different modalities as we...

The prevailing pattern of classroom interaction is a tripartite exchange structure known as IRF (teacher initiation, student response, teacher follow-up/feedback; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). Although it has its own contributions to classroom discourse, it has been criticized on several grounds, particularly for affording minimum learner participation opportunities (Kasper, 2001). An alternativ...

Speech is structured into parts by syntactic and prosodic breaks. In locally syntactic ambiguous sentences, the detection of a syntactic break necessarily follows detection of a corresponding prosodic break, making an investigation of the immediate interplay of syntactic and prosodic information impossible when studying sentences in isolation. This problem can be solved, however, by embedding s...

We describe an approach to intelligent user interfaces based on the idea of making the computer a collaborator, and an application-independent technology for implementing such interfaces. AI Magazine, Special Issue on Intelligent User Interfaces, to appear in 2001 This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part wit...

This article explores the relationship between discourse structure, grounding, and prosody in interactive discourse through an empirical analysis of task-oriented dialogue (the Australian Map Task corpus). Our focus is on the role that prosody plays in the process of grounding—the attainment and acknowledgment of mutual knowledge by discourse participants (Clark, 1996). We investigate how patte...

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence internally. Similarly, most work on children’s language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provid...

Understanding the temporal relations which hold between situations described in a narrative is a highly complex process. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the factors we have to take into account in order to determine the temporal coherence of a narrative discourse. In particular, aspectual information, tense, and world and context knowledge have to be considered and the interplay o...