Our main objective will be to construct a fully compositional representation of nominal anaphora in discourse. The proposed representation is not dependent on the remote ascription (i.e. done outside the formal representation) of syntactic indexes, which identify anaphoric links. A formal language of variable free logic is introduced. It is based on dynamic semantics paradigm and is a variant o...

The CoNLL-2015 shared task focuses on shallow discourse parsing, which takes a piece of newswire text as input and returns the discourse relations in a PDTB style. In this paper, we describe our discourse parser that participated in the shared task. We use 9 components to construct the whole parser to identify discourse connectives, label arguments and classify the sense of Explicit or Non-Expl...

We present an approach to taking the initiative to provide unrequested but relevant information in responses to Yes-No questions. In our model, stimulus conditions represent types of discourse contexts in which a speaker would be motivated to provide unrequested information. Stimulus conditions can be thought of as situational triggers which give rise to new speaker goals, and which are the com...

This paper explores the neglected ‘harms-to-others’ which result from increased attention to beauty, increased engagement in beauty practices and rising minimal beauty standards. In the first half of the paper I consider the dominant discourse of beauty harms – that of ethics and policy – and argue that this discourse has overfocused on the agency of, and possible harms to, recipients of beauty...

This study employs the framework of responses proposed by Harris (1991), notion implicature as defined Thomas (1995), and dimensions resistance introduced Clayman (2001) to examine types in Malaysian Parliamentary Question Time. Analysis revealed tendency using direct, indirect, evasive specific questions for various reasons. Direct answers were observed that could reflect positively on governm...

Early formulations of discourse coherence constraints postulated a connection between coreference likelihood and distance within a discourse parse, e.g. in the framework of Veins Theory (Cristea et al. 1998%CristeaIdeRomary1998), which proposes that coreference is expected to be encapsulated within tightly linked areas of discourse parses, called Domains of Referential Accessibility (DRAs). Usi...

As an area of classroom research, Interaction Analysis developed from the need and desire to investigate the process of classroom teaching and learning in terms of action-reaction between individuals and their socio-cultural context (Biddle, 1967). However, sole reliance on quantitative techniques could be problematic, since they conceal more than they reveal of the intricacies of classroom int...

this study was an attempt to investigate iranian and spanish intermediate nonnative english learners’ request strategies to their faculty. to this aim, 74 (50 iranian and 24 spanish) nonnative english intermediate learners participated in this study. a discourse completion test (dct) was used to elicit the request strategies used by the participants. the findings suggested the participants empl...

Languages offer various ways to present what someone said, thought, imagined, felt, and so on from their perspective. The prototypical example of a perspective-shifting device is direct quotation. In this review we define perspective shift in terms indexical shift: A quotation like “Selena ‘Oh, I don't know.’” involves because the first-person ‘I’ refers Selena, not actual speaker. We then disc...