Abstract. The development of a large information system is generally regarded as one of the most complex activities undertaken by organizations and it is dependent on the communication and understanding among the actors of the system (i.e. managers, users, developers, etc.). The Validation phase of Requirements Engineering, involves checking the formal description of the universe of discourse, ...

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of double-voicedness and James Scott’s theory of public and hidden transcripts, this essay investigates the colonial context of Romans 13:1–7 with particular attention to the Roman imperial cult. It is my contention that Paul attempts to persuade the audience to resist the imperial cult, whilst negotiating colonial power and authority. It is assumed that colo...

It has long been known that anaphoric relationships in the implicit meaning of an elided verb phrase depend on corresponding anaphoric relationships in the source of the ellipsis. This squib concernswhat the underlying cause of this dependency is. Does it arise directly through some uniform relation between the two clauses, or does it follow indirectly from independently motivated discourse pri...

We are frequently confronted with statements that are transmitted or created by computers. The question in this paper is whether the use of computers in these statements affects their truth value. In order to analyze this question, the first part of the paper discusses the theory of truth and validity claims put forward by Habermas. In the second part, the discussion is extended to the role tha...

Semantic discourse-discourse employing notions like meaning and truth-gives rise to questions about the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of such notions: What sort of metaphysical commitments does semantic discourse (as ordinarily used) involve? Does such discourse commit us to the existence of semantic properties and facts? If so, are there such properties and facts?

The purpose of this article is to present theoretical and empirical arguments for an analytic distinction between metaphorical discourse and conventional metaphor. Traditionally, in linguistics and anthropology, the formal approach to metaphors is to decompose them into conventional units of meaning, e.g., analytic predications. However, when dealing with everyday discourse, an analyst confront...

We report results on predicting the sense of implicit discourse relations between adjacent sentences in text. Our investigation concentrates on the association between discourse relations and properties of the referring expressions that appear in the related sentences. The properties of interest include coreference information, grammatical role, information status and syntactic form of referrin...

This paper argues for a novel data structure for the representation of discourse referents. A so-called hashing list is employed to store discourse referents according to their grammatical features. The account proposed combines insights from several theories of discourse comprehension. Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher, 1993) is enriched by the ranking system developed in center...

In addition to deciding what to say, s p e a k ers must decide how t o s a y it. The central premise of studies on the relationship between syntax and discourse function is that a speaker's use of a particular structural option is constrained by s p e-ciic aspects of the context of utterance. Work in discourse has uncovered a variety of speciic discourse functions served by individual syntactic...

In the paper a new approach to semantic modeling and view integration is proposed. The underlying data model is graph-based yet completely formalized so that graphical schemas themselves are precise specifications suitable for implementation: the approach is an adaptation of a familiar in the mathematical category theory specification framework based on the so called sketches. On this ground, a...