The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to investigate and critically assess the notions of “information poverty” in LIS by highlighting its connections with development discourse. Design/methodology/approach – The article takes a discourse analysis approach, which starts from Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourse. “Information poverty” is posited as a statement and investigated in its...

It is a widely accepted fact that coherence enables a text’s comprehensibility. A major source of coherence is discourse cohesion (textual properties of the text). Lexical cohesion (e.g. synonymy) and discourse connectives are two major types of discourse cohesion. We investigate the contribution of these two types of cohesion to the overall comprehension of bi-clausal sentences in Turkish. In ...

This article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical differences between Italian and English sales promotion letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written business communication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how information is presented and what rhetorical strategie...

Previous literature on the study of identity representation in political discourse has been mainly concerned with the spoken discourse and the representation of self. However, the way different groups of political agents represent others’ identities across languages has not attracted much attention. Using Wodak’s (2007) Discourse Historical approach to CDA, the present study investigates the wa...

Abstract In this article we investigate how speakers manage discourse expectations in dialogue by comparing the meaning and use of three Dutch particles, i.e. wel , toch eigenlijk, which all express a contrast between their host utterance discourse-based expectation . The core meanings toch, eigenlijk are formally distinguished on basis two intersubjective parameters: (i) whether particle marks...

in this study an adaptation of halliday and hasan's (1976) description of cohesion in english was applied to the spoken narratives of typical developing children. regarding the development in grammatical cohesion, narrations of 3 groups of children 4;00 to 7;00 years of age, 5 in each age group, were analyzed and compared with each other. this research applies an experimental method.to evaluate...

Discourse Parsing and Sentiment Analysis are two fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing that have been shown to be mutually beneficial. In this work, we design and compare two Neural models for jointly learning both tasks. In the proposed approach, we first create a vector representation for all the text segments in the input sentence. Next, we apply three different Recursive Neural N...

In this study, we identify systematic discourse characteristics in the academic writings of Korean and American scientists. Specifically, we employ Contrastive Corpus Analysis (CCA) using the computational tool, The Gramulator to extract statistically improbable “n gram” features that occur across texts. The results indicate that Korean scientists use non standard varietal forms of English (i.e...