We present an approach to utterance representation which views utterances and their sub-constituents as instructions for contextual update: programs in a dynamic logic defined with respect to the dialogue gameboard of (Ginzburg, 1996; Fernández, 2003b). This approach allows utterance processing protocols to be represented within the grammar rather than postulated as separate dialogue processes:...

During the grammatical encoding of spoken multiword utterances, various kinds of information must be used to determine the order of words. For example, whereas in adjective-noun utterances like "red car," word order can be determined on the basis of the word's grammatical class information, in noun-noun utterances like "... by car, bus, or ...," word order cannot be determined on the basis of a...

I analyze the way in which Bildungsroman seizes on bisexuality two contemporary French novels: Saccage (2006) by Éric Jourdan and A Boy Like Another (2012) Joël Breurec. novelistic genre representing entry into adulthood of a young protagonist his identity construction, proves here to be an adequate analytical tool for understanding construction bisexual through literary strategies aimed at rep...

This paper describes a model of cooperative behavior and describes how such a model can be applied in a natural language understanding system. We assume that agents attempt to recognize the plans of other agents and, then, use this plan when deciding what response to make. In particular, we show that, given a setting in which purposeful dialogues occur, this model can account for responses that...

Meanings are constructed situationally by the participants in interaction, as they construe intent in each other’s uttered words. A well-known story (said to be a favorite of both Vygotsky and Bakhtin) tells of a group of sailors having a nuanced exchange by repeating the same expletive to each other, but with a different intonation and timing at each turn. This polysemousness of words is equal...

In a tutorial setting, we often hear expressions such as “The method we are about to discuss will help you solve . . . ” or “Let us consider a subject which demands some more practice,” which are issued by a tutor to motivate a student to attend to forthcoming discourse. In this paper we model the meaning of these expressions in terms of their anticipated influence on the status of a listener’s...

Pareidolias are visual illusions of meaningful objects, such as faces and animals, that arise from ambiguous forms embedded in visual scenes. Pareidolias and visual hallucinations have been suggested to have a common underlying neural mechanism in patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). The aim of the present study was to find an externally observable physiological indicator of pareidoli...

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bo...