This study examined the relationship between White Americans' genetic explanations, conceptualized as genetic lay theories, for perceived racial differences and for sexual orientation, and attitudes toward Blacks, and gay men and lesbians, respectively. Considering contrasting public discourse surrounding race and sexual orientation, we predicted that genetic lay theories would be associated wi...

By a domain we mean a universe of discourse. Typical examples are (partially) man-made universes of discourse such as Air Traffic, Airports, Financial Services (banks, insurance companies, securities trading [brokers, traders, stock exchanges]), Health Care (hospitals etc.), Secure IT Systems (according to Intl. ISO/IEC Standard 17799), The Market (consumers, retailers, wholesalers, producers, ...

Concepts of greater and greater complexity can be constructed by building systems of entities, by relating other entities to that system with a figure-ground relation, by embedding concepts of figure-ground in the concept of change, by embedding that in causality, and by coarsening the granularity and beginning the process over again. This process can be called the Ontological Ascent. It pervad...

Scientific discourse leaves implicit a vast amount of knowledge, assumes that this background knowledge is taken into account – even taken for granted – and treated as undisputed. In particular, the terminology in the empirical sciences is treated as antecedently understood. The background knowledge surrounding a theory is usually assumed to be true or approximately true. This is in sharp contr...

The replacement of code theories of communication by inferential theories has implications for the study of linguistic meaning. This paper surveys some of these implications and outlines an inferential theory – relevance theory – with which semantic analyses of context-dependent expressions, polysemous and ambiguous expressions, and non-truth-conditional expressions (e.g. mood indicators, disco...

This article examines the theories of the power of ancient music and the superiority of the sense of hearing proposed by Girolamo Cardano in his De subtilitate and Julius Caesar Scaliger's critique of these views in his Exercitationes exotericae de subtilitate. Despite Scaliger's rejection of Cardano's claim that he had successfully revealed the "subtle" nature of the sense of hearing and the i...

On the face of it these theories are rather similar: both provide hierarchical characterisations of texts, and both seem concerned with the purpose of the text for GSDT, the text realizes the intentional structure that underlies it; and for R.ST, the text is structured in terms of the rhetorical relations that hold between its parts. But these similarities are only skin deep. The kinds of trees...

The purpose of this research is to rescue from the 1950s onwards, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, both the discursive and non-discursive practices, on how the nursing teaching went on being redesigned, in search of a profession that would be more scientific, less technicistic, and how the nursing theories had had a participation in such process of transformations and contradictions. The surv...

This study examines the nature of the discourse of advertising. The focus is on consumer advertising, which is directed towards the promotion of some product or service to the general public. The study, however, is not meant to exhaust all the aspects of this particular discourse, or present an answer to all the problems it poses. Rather, it aims at uncovering the basic elements of the most per...

The symposium entitled Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation had two goals: (1) to investigate the empirical methods that can be used in the development and evaluation of computational theories of discourse and (2) to develop a set of shared resources for the computational discourse community. The workshop was successful at achieving the first goal because of the large nu...