Previous eye tracking studies [1] demonstrated that a prominent L+H* accent in English instructions evoked a contrastive relationship between discourse referents, immediately guiding listeners’ eye movements to contrastive candidates in the visual scene. However, the visual layout in the previous study conflated looks to contrastive candidates with those to previously fixated object groups, thu...

With the approach of critical linguistics, the study compares and contrasts the personage description in Hong Kong and Mainland China entertainment news discourse. Examining the texts of the news reports against the different social contexts they were produced, the study establishes three contrastive parameters that characterize the personage reporting across the two regions: contrast in narrat...

This paper examines an understudied area of pragmatic research, namely, the sequencing of Discourse Markers (DMs). Looking only at the sequencing of Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDMs), thereby excluding both Elaborative and Inferential Discourse Markers, it is shown that only “but” may occur as the first with all of the other CDMs, e.g., “But, on the other hand...,” with “yet” occurring first...

This paper is concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of teenagers, taken from a newly developed specialised corpus the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (BATTICC). More specifically, the study employs a discourse analytical approach to examine vague language in an intercultural context among a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, paying particul...

Text analysis traditions in France and the United States include discourse analysis, critical linguistics, French functional linguistics, Bakhtinian dialogics, and “generous reading.” These frames have not been used, however, in crosscultural analysis of university student writing. The author presents a study of 250 student texts from French and U.S. introductory university courses, using a met...

Coreference choices are influenced by multiple factors, including information structural categories such as topic and focus. These information structural categories can be indicated by intonation, yet few studies have investigated how intonation affects subsequent choices for coreference. Using a story continuation experiment with aurally presented stimuli, we show that the location of contrast...