Studies of computer-supported collaborative learning have begun to explore processes of online group cognition—such as small-group methods of problem solving—and how they can be mediated by various technological and interactional mechanisms to promote academically productive discourse. This chapter first presents (1) an analysis of co-presence as a foundational aspect of online interaction in a...

The salience of an entity in the discourse is correlated with the type of referring expression that speakers use to refer to that entity. Speakers tend to use pronouns to refer to salient entities, whereas they use lexical noun phrases to refer to less salient entities. We propose a novel approach to formalize the interaction between salience and choices of referring expressions using topic mod...

A model is presented that addresses both the distribution and comprehension of different forms of referring expressions in language. This model is expressed in a formalism (Kamp & Reyle, 1993) that uses interpretive rules to map syntactic representations onto representations of discourse. Basic interpretive rules are developed for names, pronouns, definite descriptions, and quantified descripti...

In the interaction between agents we can have an explicative discourse, when communicating preferences or intentions, and a normative discourse, when considering normative knowledge. For justifying their actions our agents are endowed with a Justification and Explanation Logic (JEL), capable to cover both the justification for their commitments and explanations why they had to act in that way, ...

The current observational and descriptive study makes an attempt to present the interactional discourse patterns of corrective feedback (CF) and uptake occuring in a communicative adolescent EFL class. Using Lyster and Ranta’s corrective discourse model (1997), this study intends to investigate, describe, and analyze the discourse patterns of corrective feedback utilized by an Iranian teacher a...

Linguistic theories typically assign various linguistic phenomena to one of the categories, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic, as if the phenomena in each category were relatively independent of those in the others. However, various phenomena in discourse do not seem to yield comfortably to any account that is strictly a syntactic or semantic or pragmatic one. This paper focuses on part icular ...

As Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) state, there is no communication without interaction. Broadly, levels of “interactivity” can be recognized as depending on quality of feedback and control and exchange of discourse according to the mode or modes (“multimodal discourse”) involved. Important constraints that operate to modify interactivity of any kind can be identified as the amount of “common grou...

With the approach of critical linguistics, the study compares and contrasts the personage description in Hong Kong and Mainland China entertainment news discourse. Examining the texts of the news reports against the different social contexts they were produced, the study establishes three contrastive parameters that characterize the personage reporting across the two regions: contrast in narrat...

The starting point of this paper is the observation that in a question-answer dialog the use of but instead of and is obligatory if the answer is overinformative in that it includes an additional topic. A focus-semantic analysis of but is presented showing that (a) but is focus-sensitive and (b) but requires a denial with respect to the appropriate quaestio. This analysis provides a uniform bas...

We propose an architecture for integrating discourse processing and speech recognition (SR) in spoken dialogue systems. It was first developed for computer-mediated bilingual dialogue in voiceto-voice machine translation applications and we apply it here to a distributed battlefield simulation system used for military training. According to this architecture discourse functions previously distr...