Speech and language processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition, 2nd Edition

17 DISCOURSE ¡ Gracie: Oh yeah.. . and then Mr. and Mrs. Jones were having matrimonial trouble, and my brother was hired to watch Mrs. Jones. George: Well, I imagine she was a very attractive woman. Gracie: She was, and my brother watched her day and night for six months. George: Well, what happened? Gracie: She finally got a divorce. Up to this point of the book, we have focused primarily on language phenomena that operate at the word or sentence level. Of course, language does not normally consist of isolated, unrelated sentences, but instead of collo-cated, related groups of sentences. We refer to such a group of sentences as a discourse. DISCOURSE The chapter you are now reading is an example of a discourse. It is in fact a discourse of a particular sort: a monologue. Monologues are charac-MONOLOGUE terized by a speaker (a term which will be used to include writers, as it is here), and a hearer (which, analogously, includes readers). The communication flows in only one direction in a monologue, that is, from the speaker to the hearer. After reading this chapter, you may have a conversation with a friend about it, which would consist of a much freer interchange. Such a discourse is called a dialogue. In this case, each participant periodically takes turns DIALOGUE ¢ This chapter was written by Andrew Kehler.