Quantifiers are ubiquitous in natural language and, in addition to providing information about quantity, they serve important discourse functions. We outline several theoretical accounts of the functions that quantifiers perform in a discourse and the factors governing their interpretation, focusing on two specific topics that have received substantial attention from researchers working in ling...

Coreference systems are driven by syntactic, semantic, and discourse constraints. We present a simple approach which completely modularizes these three aspects. In contrast to much current work, which focuses on learning and on the discourse component, our system is deterministic and is driven entirely by syntactic and semantic compatibility as learned from a large, unlabeled corpus. Despite it...

Many factors are known to influence the inference of the discourse coherence relationship between two sentences. Here, we examine the relationship between two conjoined embedded clauses in sentences like The professor noted that the student teacher did not look confident and (that) the students were poorly behaved. In two studies, we find that the presence of that before the second embedded cla...

WHILST the public debate over the ‘idea of Portuguese identity’ within the European context has taken place during this last decade in the media,1 I have not encountered (linguistic) studies on discourses of national identity construction and representation. Another omission is in-depth analyses of the media’s contribution to the reshaping of discourse(s) hence social practice(s) in relation to...

The aim of this study was to analyze the discourse of health managers on aspects related to delay in tuberculosis diagnosis. This was a qualitative research study, conducted with 16 Family Health Unit managers. The empirical data were obtained through semi-structured interviews. The analysis was based on the theoretical framework of the French school of discourse analysis. According to the mana...

In this paper we present a cognitive model of the acquisition and use of referring expressions in discourse. In certain discourse contexts, children produce unrecoverable pronouns where a full NP would have been the adult choice. Based on computational simulations of our model, we argue that adult-like use of referring subjects requires (a) sufficient working memory capacity to identify the dis...

This paper is motivated by the observation that not all adjectives in Chinese have a canonical antonym. For example, most Chinese speakers choose to translate the English word dishonest into a word string bu chengshi ‘not honest’ instead of any antonym candidates of chengshi suggested in antonym dictionaries. Our discourse evidence from corpus data suggests that bu chengshi is evolving into a w...

Location discourse involves the active or passive sharing of location information between individuals. Related applications include mobile friend locators, and location-dependent messaging. Privacy issues pertaining to location disclosure have been considered in research and relevant design guidelines are emerging, however what location information a user actually “needs to know” has received l...

1.2 The distinctive aspect of this review of evidence is that it seeks to integrate, as far as is possible, the discourse of evidence-based practice (built on observation and measurement), with the humanitarian, recovery-based discourse based on values (such as responsibility, choice, and empowerment). The review identifies where the optimism which is central to recovery discourse needs to be t...