The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...

This paper analyses negotiation of meaning and codeswitching in discourse between 29 language students from classes at a German and a North American university, who teamed up with their peers to collaborate on projects whose results they had to present to the other groups in the MOO during the final weeks of the project. From October to December 1998, these learners, who formed a total of eight...

Educators often employ various training techniques to reduce raters’ subjectivity. Negotiation is a technique which can assist novice raters to co-construct a shared understanding of the writing assessment when rating collaboratively. There is little research, however, on rating behaviors of novice raters while employing negotiation techniques and the effect of negotiation on their understandin...

This paper reports a new approach to coaching collaboration in a synchronous distance learning context. Prior work on supporting collaboration has relied largely on comparing student discourse to models of collaborative discourse. Comparison of student work to expert solutions is prevalent in individual coaching paradigms. Although these approaches are valuable, our approach evaluates the poten...

Text analysis traditions in France and the United States include discourse analysis, critical linguistics, French functional linguistics, Bakhtinian dialogics, and “generous reading.” These frames have not been used, however, in crosscultural analysis of university student writing. The author presents a study of 250 student texts from French and U.S. introductory university courses, using a met...

The central task in practical problem solving is to identify and choose among alterative courses of action. Computer science has failed to provide adequate tools for supporting rational, effective and fair decision-making under the conditions which usually prevail. Especially, computer science has yet to develop models of rational decisionmaking in groups which adequately take into consideratio...

The complexity of the dilemmas we face on an organizational, societal and global scale forces us into sensemaking activity. We need tools for expressing and contesting perspectives flexible enough for real time use in meetings, structured enough to help manage longer term memory, and powerful enough to filter the complexity of extended deliberation and debate on an organizational or global scal...

Authors such as Tyler Schnoebelen (on page 12 of his study Emotions are Relational: Positioning and the Use Affective Linguistic Resources), suggest that in some languages (cf. Navajo), certain dependent clauses frequently used independently to “mark emotional evaluation background information”. Evans, work on insubordination its uses, makes use term refer this phenomenon. Our focuses a particu...

for a long time, culture has been an influencing parameter in negotiations. growth of international trades and business competitions has increased the importance of negotiations among countries and different cultures. developing new technologies, particularly the use of artificial intelligence in electronic trading areas, has provided us with the application of intelligent agents to resolve cha...