Two experiments were conducted to investigate discourse representation in the two cerebral hemispheres as a function of reading skill. We used a lateralized visual-field procedure to compare left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) sensitivity to different discourse relations in readers with varying skill levels. In Experiment 1, we investigated two levels of discourse representation in m...

This article argues that the body model advocated by different versions of social constructivism has an astonishing affinity with the body in biotechnologies. Both discourses, that of the social constructivism and that of techno-biomedicine, claim that the body is a construction and both insist in recognizing its total malleability and accessibility, contradicting its materiality. Therefore, th...

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...

Discourse structure is concerned with how the parts of a text relate together to convey meaning. In task-oriented dialogues, such as those which occur in the domain of Vie-DU , a NL consulting system designed to provide information on the granting of subsidies for house improvements, the structure of discourse corresponds strongly with the goals and intentions of the agents involved in the inte...

The pairing of linguistic form to discourse function has been much discussed in the literature over the last several years. Prince (1996) phrases the question thusly: what is it exactly that discourse functions are associated with? Particular form-function pairings do not appear to be cross-linguistically universal; a given linguistic – that is, syntactic – form may be associated in different l...

Research on discourse segmentation frequently involves the identification of certain cues in the various dimensions of text, speech, and gesture. Advances in automated segmentation models and algorithms have been achieved when these cues are taken into consideration. For gestures in particular, it must be observed that their presence and function as cues for discourse boundaries are both genrea...