This paper analyzes opinion categories like Sentiment and Arguing in meetings. We first annotate the categories manually. We then develop genre-specific lexicons using interesting function word combinations for detecting the opinions. We analyze relations between dialog structure information and opinion expression in context of multiparty discourse. Finally we show that classifiers using lexica...

Discourse audiences are susceptible to fall victims of the concealed ideological representations in discourses at the expanse of changing and modifying their mental models through which they act on the world. Translators as readers and at the same time intercultural mediators need to be equipped with the knowledge of how ideology is accommodated in discourse both not to fall victim to it and to...

The paper gives a contrastive analysis of the two semantic categories specificity and definiteness. It argues against the traditional picture that assumes that specific expressions are a subclass of indefinite NPs. The paper rather assumes that the two categories are independent of each other. Definiteness expresses the discourse pragmatic property of familiarity, while specificity mirrors a mo...

Title of dissertation: COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF THE ROLE OF DISCOURSE INFORMATION IN LANGUAGE PRODUCTION AND ACQUISITION Naho Orita, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Professor Naomi Feldman Department of Linguistics This dissertation explores the role of discourse information in language production and language acquisition. Discourse information plays an important role in v...

'Poetry' and 'prose' are categories which are normally used to distinguish the two main types of discourse in language. But there is some debate whether this division is helpful and valid when applied to the discourse of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas most scholars accept the validity of the two categories, Kugel (1981) has argued forcefully that the category of poetry is a misleading imposition of ...

There are contradictory ideas concerning the function of metaphors in discourse. Cognitive linguists claim that metaphors are constitutive of reasoning, e.g. Lakoff (1986; 1987). In contrast, anthropologists claim that metaphors are not especially prominent in everyday discourse, e.g. Quinn (1991). This article is an attempt to reconcile the conflicting positions. Instead of the contemporary st...

This paper discusses an approach of modelling design rational expressed in natural language sentences into a discourse model. The discourse model is used to classify captured rationale into discourse categories by taking into account semantic and pragmatic relationships between two design elements. It is expected that accessibility and reusability of captured rationale is improved since retriev...

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...