This paper examines the indexical function of prosody in the signalling of discourse deixis and anaphora (in particular, contrastive accent versus low pitch and weak stress on certain types of context-bound referring expressions: demonstrative-based as well as 3rd person pronouns – mainly in English). The choice of contrastive versus weak stress on given expression types of this character will ...

An analogy is presented between music and linguistic discourse in terms of lexical cohesion. Linguistic discourse and music are two different manifestations of human communication. They are both meaningful and coherent, and both are processes inherently temporal. Lexical cohesion is a semantic relation manifested in the lexical level of language. A short sample of discourse is analysed and comp...

The paper gives a contrastive analysis of the two semantic categories specificity and definiteness. It argues against the traditional picture that assumes that specific expressions are a subclass of indefinite NPs. The paper rather assumes that the two categories are independent of each other. Definiteness expresses the discourse pragmatic property of familiarity, while specificity mirrors a mo...

This study aims to understand certain linguistic and semantic resources for the text construction, namely the constructs of cohesion, coherence. The analysis of cohesive ties was conducted on the writing samples of 40 subjects (20 most coherent and 20 least coherent) Iranian undergraduates of English. This prompted us to identify the dominant types of cohesive devices used in most coherent writ...

This study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in English and Persian abstracts of Iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. For this purpose, one hundred English and Persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on Seddigh and Yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Halli...

New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (...

media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. the analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. adopting van dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the iranian movie a separation, the winner of the 84th annual academy award f...

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...

This paper describes the development of discourse cohesion in bilingual children, through an analysis of narrative discourses produced by hearing children of deaf parents (HCDP) in both British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English. Reference mechanisms in both languages are described in the context of recent work on narrative and discourse organization development in spoken and sign language....