We provide an account of the alignment of linguistic form and discourse function with respect to English tag questions, adopting as a formal framework Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. SDRT models the discourse function of utterances via their rhetorical connection to the antecedent discourse. We pay particular attention to the prosodic features of tag questions and their contribution ...

The discourse of 91 children who had sustained severe (n = 68) or mild (n = 23) closed head injury (CHI) was examined at least three years postinjury. The groups' retellings of a narrative story were analyzed according to two domains, information and language. In comparison to the mild CHI group, the severe group produced stories characterized by reduced content and information, impaired organi...

Recent studies on the analysis of intonational function examine a r a n ~ of materials from cue phrases in monologue (Litman and Hirschberg, 1990) and dialogue (Hirschberg and Litman, 1987; Hockey, 1991) to longer utterances in both monologue and dialogue (McLemore, 1991). Results match specific intonational tunes to certain discourse functions which are more or less well defined. Although thes...

Previous research has shown that certain discourse conditions are necessary for the felicitous use of non-canonical syntactic forms like topicalization, left-dislocation, and clefts. However, the distribution of these forms does not correlate one-to-one with the presence of these conditions, and a system that generates these statisticallyrare forms based only on these conditions will overgenera...

In this paper, we observe the effects that discourse function attribute to the task of training learned classifiers for sentiment analysis. Experimental results from our study show that training on a corpus of primarily persuasive documents can have a negative effect on the performance of supervised sentiment classification. In addition we demonstrate that through use of the Multinomial Näıve B...

this bipartite paper examines the function of tasrif in the quranic story of creation in the light of halliday's textual meta-function. first, the quranic concept of tasrif as a field in elm-al maani (semantics of syntax), and its relation to systemic linguistics is introduced and reviewed. then, through review of literature, it is referred to givenness hierarchy, empathy degree, point of ...

The present study investigates how advice writers employ move sequences and modal verbs to achieve intended discourse functions. This paper aims to testify two research hypotheses: 1. Advice writers of different topics employ different moves and modal verbs to achieve discourse function, and 2. The differences may imply writers’ intentions, emotion and expectancy of effects on the readers to in...

One of the important functions of every Semiotic system is its local function. In a discourse, places have various roles such as objective, acting, being, abstract, narrative and mythical. In addition they have referential, narrative, tensional, metaphorical and transcendental functions and they play a role in creation of meaning. By strengthening objective and physical aspects of place, its co...

Processing discourse connectives is important for tasks such as discourse parsing and generation. For these tasks, it is useful to know which connectives can signal the same coherence relations. This paper presents experiments into modelling the substitutability of discourse connectives. It shows that substitutability effects distributional similarity. A novel variancebased function for compari...