In order to generate cohesive discourse, many of the relations holding between text segments need to be signalled to the reader by means of cue words, or discourse markers. Programs usually do this in a simplistic way, e.g., by using one marker per relation. In reality, however, language ooers a very wide range of markers from which informed choices should be made. In order to account for the v...

Pragmatic competence is one essential component of communicative competence; however, it has been quite neglected until recent years. Among all, the knowledge and ability to use discourse markers (DMs) cannot be overemphasized because they often facilitate cross-cultural communications. Due to the culture-bound nature, DMs (e.g., “well”, “y’know”) are often used quite differently across culture...

as a member of larger familyof formulaic sequences , lexical bundles play different discourse functions in written research articles. this study investigated the use of four-word lexical bundles in published research articles in medicine via natural language processing by computational linguistics. a corpus of 2,420,914 words was extracted from 790 research articles in 33 medical disciplines. f...

The article deals with Spanish-language contrargumentative discourse markers as a separate class of expressions and words that perform common functions: they connect fragments discourse, explain what semantic links exist between the text elements, manage communication process, interpretation by speaker recipient, correlate, compare contrast statements in discourse. These units not only syntacti...

• Temporal discourse markers such as after, before or while are commonly described as triggers for discourse relations expressing a temporal relation (Mann and Thompson, 1987; Knott, 1996). However, only little research has been done regarding the interaction of such discourse markers with the context within a multi-sentence discourse. Lascarides & Oberlander (1993), for instance, note that sen...

This discussion note deals with the reformulation markers (RMs) that is, that is to say, in other words, namely, i.e. and viz. and the role they play in linguistic communication as described by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995). According to Blakemore (1996), items such as that is (to say) and in other words are conceptual and non-truth conditional. This fact makes her conclude that classifying th...

Discourse markers are an important means to signal the kind of coherence relation holding between adjacent text spans. Research on generating discourse markers has been mainly concerned with causal markers, whereas temporal markers have not received much attention. In this paper, we identify semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features that are required to support a motivated choice of German tem...