The phenomenon of clitic replication in Bulgarian involves two linguistic entities: a full-fledged nominal constituent in a particular syntactic function and a co-referent weak pronominal form corresponding to the particular syntactic function. In this paper we present experimental results which support our hypothesis that the nominal material that is replicated by a pronominal clitic in Bulgar...

The goal of the MULI (MUltiLingual Information structure) project is to empirically analyse information structure in German and English newspaper texts. In contrast to other projects in which information structure is annotated and investigated (e.g. in the Prague Dependency Treebank, which mirrors the basic information about the topic-focus articulation of the sentence), we do not annotate theo...

The following main ideas have been pointed out and put to work within our paper: (a) Information Structure (IS) theories (topic-focus, theme-rheme, background-contrast, informational and contrastive focus, focus projection rules, etc.) on text are shown to behave currently as a consistent linguistic tool that can stand behind a correct, language and contextual-depending, mapping of text into sp...

The very essence of Peircean semiotics is the process through which an object is represented by a sign and creates another sign. This means that Peircean semiotics bas ically constitutes a theory of representation. This implies that the object and the sign cannot be the same and hence sign displacements occur in the cognitive processes. When dividing the Peircean sign types into signs of nature...

This paper seeks to make a pragmatic contribution to computer-assisted discourse analysis by showing how a syntactical description could be used to gain a deeper understanding of the texts. During the '80s, a large corpus (5,000 pages) of varied political discourses covering twenty five years (1934-1960) was collected and a double description of it was carried out. On the one hand, to deal with...

This paper proposes a syntax and a semantics for intonation in English and some related languages. The semantics is “surface-compositional”, in the sense that syntactic derivation constructs information-structural logical form monotonically, without rules of structural revision, and without autonomous rules of “focus projection.” This is made possible by the generalized notion of syntactic cons...

(1) can be uttered as part of a ”strategy of inquiry” (Roberts 1998, 4) where it is under discussion what members of a contextually given set of people wanted to see. It reports on Sandy’s wishes as opposed to those of the other members of the set. The felicity of this sentence under these circumstances can be made to follow from the assumption that the content of What Sandy wanted to see is th...

Several studies have employed the theme-rheme construct to examine the generic profile of research articles (RAs). However, they have mostly focused on the subject matter and nature of disciplines, and other disciplinary characteristics as contextual factors which can impact the genre realization have not been considered in the discourse analysis research. This work, therefore, inve...

Thematic progression pattern as the method of development of the text insures that the reader follows the right path in understanding the text; in this regard, this subject is attracting considerable interest among discourse analysts. This paper calls into question the status of thematic progression in the process of translating English news into Persian. With this in mind, we analyzed the them...