Coverbal gesture provides a channel for the visual expression of ideas. While some gestural emblems have culturally predefined forms (e.g., “thumbs up”), the relationship between gesture and meaning is, in general, not conventionalized. It is natural to ask whether such gestures can be interpreted in a speaker-independent way, or whether gestural form is determined by the speaker’s idiosyncrati...

I propose that Mandarin 。-sentences (units marked by 。) are aspectual topiccomment sequences, where an initial update (terminating in a pause) introduces a topic state for comment by one or more clauses. Each comment anaphorically refers to the topic state via the aspect feature of the verbal predicate. This proposal explains why Mandarin 。-sentences have controversial boundaries, since speaker...

Song Rou Jiang Yuru Wang Jingyi Beijing Language and Culture University Beijing University of Polytechnic Technology Beijing Forest University Beijing University of Information Science and technology Abstract: Due to the lack of external formal marks, components in Chinese discourse can hardly be categorized into the traditional syntactic system. In fact, Chinese is a typical topic-prominent la...

Discourse markers are words or phrases that speakers use at the beginning of a contribution to signal how it relates to prior discourse. They mark changes in the global discourse structure by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic or the return to a previous topic. However, words that are used as discourse markers often also have a sentential function. If discourse markers are to be used ...

Young children often give the impression that they speak or listen from their own perspective, with little or no recognition of the linguistic information that a discourse partner might be using. In relation to discourse reference, children often demonstrate insensitivity to rules that determine the use of discourse pronouns (Karmiloff-Smith 1981). Frequently, discourse development has been exp...

Asher (2004) argues that developing a formal theory of discourse topic has proved difficult not least because ‘the notion of topic is not a homogeneous one’ [p1]. Against the theoretical background provided by SDRT, Asher helps clarify a number of issues, distinguishing sentence topic, contrastive topic, and discourse topic. He also contrasts ‘themes’, which play a role in the semantics of the ...

To communicate efficiently, speakers typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and adapt their utterances to the listener's discourse representation. Information structure describes how linguistic information is packaged within a discourse to optimize information transfer. The present study investigates the nature and time course of context integration (i.e., aboutness topic ...

In this paper, we present a novel approach in automatic discourse segmentation without a full semantic understanding. In order to analyse the textual bonds and determine the degree of coherence that a discourse may exhibit, we first represent the tremendous diversity of textual relations into a discourse network. A set of mutual linguistic constraints that largely determines the similarity of m...

This study investigated whether semantic integration in discourse context could be influenced by topic structure using event-related brain potentials. Participants read discourses in which the last sentence contained a critical word that was either congruent or incongruent with the topic established in the first sentence. The intervening sentences between the first and the last sentence of the ...