This study investigated prosodic realization of discourse topic by comparing professional and non-professional speakers’ production of four discourses. In each discourse, the target sentence, as the discourse topic, was either at the discourse initial position or at a non-initial position. Six professional and 20 non-professional speakers read aloud all the discourses with two repetitions. Exte...

This article introduces a qualitative research method called discourse tracing. Discourse tracing draws from contributions made by ethnographers, discourse critics, case study scholars, and process tracers. The approach offers new insights and an attendant language about how we engage in research designed specifically for the critical-interpretive and applied analysis of discourse. More specifi...

The width and the position of the pitch range reveals important information about the structure of a spoken discourse. This paper studies the correlation between the pitch range and the discourse structure based on a large database. The model used to analyze the discourse is based on a two-level description of registers. Primary register features reflect the prosodic phrasing within a discourse...

Implicit discourse relation recognition is a crucial component for automatic discourse-level analysis and nature language understanding. Previous studies exploit discriminative models that are built on either powerful manual features or deep discourse representations. In this paper, instead, we explore generative models and propose a variational neural discourse relation recognizer. We refer to...

Discourse markers improve both the quality and comprehension of a written text. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit and implicit instruction of formal meta-discourse markers on writ- ing skills. The quantitative data were collected from 90 upper-intermediate students at Shiraz Univer- sity Language Center. Two experimental groups went through an instruction, while the contr...

In light of a large number of admirable attempts which look at scientific discourse from social, dialogic and interpersonal points of view, the propositions which consider scientific discourse as an interactive endeavor are now well-established. By the force of our social constructivist gyrations, we have developed glimpses of a social, cultural and historical dimension in which the discourse o...

Comparing the questions -proposed for this discourse panel with those identified for the TINLAP-2 panel eight years ago, it becomes clear that some progress has been made in discourse studies. While TINLAP-2's questions seem concerned with identifying an ideal model of discourse (e.g., what constitutes an appropriate model of discourse, how domain-dependent must such models be, what makes disco...

We propose designing a discourse parser specifically for the evaluative text genre. We aim to see whether focusing on a certain genre and relations specific to that genre offers performance gain beyond more generic discourse parsers. In this extended abstract we describe the approach we intend to take, and how this differs from what has been done previously. The problem of discourse parsing It ...

Organism and environment are in a state of constant interaction, and discourse is viewed as one form of manifestation of this interaction. Through the study of discourse insights can be gained into those components that bring about mental events. Verbal structure, communication of beliefs and action/interaction are highly interactive dimensions of discourse. Taking this perspective as a framewo...