Speakers have been hypothesized to organize discourse content so as to achieve communicative efficiency. Previous work has focused on indirect tests of the hypothesis that speakers aim to keep per-word entropy constant across discourses to achieve communicative efficiency (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). We present novel and more direct evidence by examining the role of topic shift in discourse plann...

The Japanese particle wa is widely considered a marker for topic. This paper presents new evidence that contrary to this general view, wa does not only mark topic, but it also marks items that are simply discourse anaphoric. The evidence comes from the observation that a wa-phrase displays distinct syntactic behaviour depending on whether it is interpreted as a topic or discourse anaphoric. It ...

This paper reports on corpus-based research into the relationship between intonational variation and discourse structure. We examine the effects of speaking style (read versus spontaneous) and of discourse segmentation method (text-alone versus text-and-speech) on the nature of this relationship. We also compare the acoustic-prosodic features of initial, medial, and final utterances in a discou...

The information structure categories of Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus are examined to see their crucial roles in polarity and (conventional) implicature generation and implicature suspension and their respective correlatins with PA and SN conjunctions on one hand and descriptive (denotational) negation and metalinguistic negation on the other. The underlying notion of concessivity inv...

Previous studies have suggested that focusing an element can enhance the activation of the focused element and bring about a number of processing benefits. However, whether and how this local prominence of information interacts with global discourse organization remains unclear. In the present study, we addressed this issue in two experiments. Readers were presented with four-sentence discourse...

background considering the cognitive and linguistic complexity of discourse production, it is expected that individuals with traumatic brain injury (tbi) should face difficulties in this task. therefore, clinical examination of discourse has become a useful tool for studying and assessment of communication skills of people suffering from tbi. among different genres of discourse, persuasive disc...

I n t r o d u c t i o n In this paper, we describe a method for discovering coherent texts from the uns t ruc tured corpus. T h e method is bo th linguistically and statistically motivated. It derives a linguistic motivat ion front the view tha t discourse consists of what we call discourse segments , minimal coherent mtits of discourse (Nomoto and Nitta, 1993), while statist ically it is guide...