Discourse markers are words or phrases that function as indicators of the structure of discourse by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic. This study reports on the Swedish discourse markers men ‘but’/‘and’ and så ‘so’, their functions and prosodic correlates in dialogue.

We introduce a simple semi-supervised approach to improve implicit discourse relation identification. This approach harnesses large amounts of automatically extracted discourse connectives along with their arguments to construct new distributional word representations. Specifically, we represent words in the space of discourse connectives as a way to directly encode their rhetorical function. E...

There are contradictory ideas concerning the function of metaphors in discourse. Cognitive linguists claim that metaphors are constitutive of reasoning, e.g. Lakoff (1986; 1987). In contrast, anthropologists claim that metaphors are not especially prominent in everyday discourse, e.g. Quinn (1991). This article is an attempt to reconcile the conflicting positions. Instead of the contemporary st...

Discourse unfolds in time, giving rise to a cascade of belief changes in the listener. Yet this temporal evolution of discourse and belief is typically ignored in theoretical treatments of discourse. It has been claimed (see Soames Soames, 1989]) that Heim's Heim, 1983] theory of discourse context accounts for non-implicative discourse updating. We will present a new non-implicative discourse t...

A natural and intuitive principle concerning the organization of content in discourse is that discourse structure and rhetorical function operate at several levels of granularity at once. There are low level discourse connections between elementary discourse units (EDUs), even within a single sentence; but there are also discourse connections between larger constituents, complex discourse units...

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 ...

This paper aims to rehabilitate the idea that there are conditional connectives in the logical forms of natural language. I propose to adopt a connective with a truth-value gap semantics inspired by Belnap (1970), such that conditionals only have a truth-value if their antecedent is true. Together with the assumption that quantifiers select worlds for which their scope is defined, this predicts...

This article is a critical study of the Facebook pages of politicians as public spheres using Dahlberg’s notion of contestation. A method is implemented inspired by qualitative content analysis and including focus groups in order to study citizen comments on eight main political candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2011 Danish election campaign. An analytical framework is presented that concep...

Discourse analysis, or text-linguistics, is an approach to interpreting Scripture that seeks to understand a discourse’s use of language and that examines the structure of the entire discourse. This method will be applied to Hebrews 10:19–25 in order to understand its basic meaning and function in the book of Hebrews. However, discourse analysis is not a long-standing, well defined, methodologi...