As part of a wider attempt to bestow the spirit of scholarly prose upon the research articles’ rhetorical structure, academic writers invariably take advantage of quantity metadiscourse markers to avoid prolixity and live up to the implicit and explicit maxims of quantity category as suggested in Gricean CP and similar models.  In order to develop a clear understanding of quantity strategies di...

In this paper we describe patterns of spatial co-ordination that, we propose, are a distinctive characteristic of multi-person face-to-face interactions. The data come from a task in which participants describe some simple, non-spatial, computer code in an instructor / learner scenario. Three participants take part; 2 instructors and 1 learner. Using excerpts from these interactions we show tha...

To win the attention of the audience, presidential candidates rely on their own rhetorical methods. Hedges and boosters as metadiscourse markers have been the focus of many studies as the communicative strategies enabling speakers to soften the force of utterances or moderate their assertive force. TV news was used as the corpus of this study, whereas most of the previous studies have focused o...

In Urama there are two clause-final particles, ka and ra, that encode a variety of both semantic and pragmatic meanings. While previous approaches have treated these particles as clause-type markers or evidential morphemes, this paper argues that one of these particles, ka, has another previously undocumented function in conversation: to mark speaker-knowledge and what the speaker assumes the a...

In addition to being able to infer a user's domain goals, a natural language expert consultation system must also be able to 1) recognize the user's preferences regarding the domain plan being developed and 2) infer the user's problem-solving goals and model the problem-solving process. This paper discusses both the usefulness of user preferences to the plan recognition process and the necessit...

The ongoing Pan-European integration process has profoundly influenced the nature of European law and its development, demanding a review “the ways how language […] is materialized” (Gibová, 2009, p. 192). EU multilingualism thus becoming an intricate concept since “EU translation Europe” 192) encompassing supranational view world co...