Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have...

Distinguishing between paradigmatic relations such as synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy is an important prerequisite in a range of NLP applications. In this paper, we explore discourse relations as an alternative set of features to lexico-syntactic patterns. We demonstrate that statistics over discourse relations, collected via explicit discourse markers as proxies, can be utilized as salient in...

Usage of discourse markers in tutorial language can make the difference between stilted and natural sounding dialogue. In this paper we describe some simple rules for selection of discourse markers. These rules were derived for use in an intelligent tutoring system by applying decision-tree machine learning to human tutoring language. The fact that these selection rules operate within the envir...

Variables on which constraints are imposed incrementally can be said to carry \existential" force in the following sense. Under a translation, commonly used in analyzing natural language discourse, of rst-order formulas into programs from quantiied dynamic logic, such a variable is introduced (at the level of formulas) by an existential quantiier. The present paper extends that translation to s...

Medical discourse has recently attracted much scholarly attention. However, few studies have concentrated on both the overall rhetorical structure of the research article (RA) and the specific lexicogrammatical features of the texts, particularly English-Persian contrastive studies on medical RAs. Relying on Nwogu’s (1997) framework, the present study aimed at providing a macroanalysis of the I...

The study of discourse markers has attracted the attention researchers as a facet linguistics since 19th century. focus research been based on theoretical status in relation to how they are used and for what reasons, explored different contexts settings; however, few studies have conducted context Saudi Arabia. This study, therefore, attempted look at use by senior university students majoring ...

This paper is an attempt to clarify the status of discourse markers. These lexical expressions have been studied under various labels, including discourse markers, discourse connectives, discourse operators, pragmatic connectives, sentence connectives, and cue phrases. Although most researchers agree that they are expressions which relate discourse segments, there is no agreement on how they ar...