This paper unearths the contribution of lexical cohesion to the textuality and overall meaning of Malcolm X’s speech 'The Ballot or the Bullet'. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Hoey’s (1991) theory of cohesion, specifically lexical   cohesion, whose main thrust is the role of lexical items in not only contributing to meaning but also serving as cohesive ties, the paper discusses how ...

As an indispensable part of journal article, English abstract can promote the sharing and exchange international academic achievements. Cohesion coherence are important criteria a good abstract. Based on Halliday Hasan’s cohesion theory, this study compares 60 abstracts written by Chinese native scholars. The results show that ellipsis substitution rarely used, while reference conjunction often...

Objective: Many studies have suggested that there is a relationship between coherence and cognitive processes. This study aims at investigating this hypothesis through assessing the relationship between cognitive variables and coherence in the discourse of two groups of Persian-speaking younger and older adults. Methods: In order to evaluate our participants' cognitive capabilities, we recrui...

This paper presents the prosodic analysis of a corpus of Brazilian Portuguese attitudes. Attitudes are separated between the social and propositional categories, and performed either with an assertive or an interrogative modality. Previous studies show the particular relevance of prosodic cues for propositional attitudes, while visual cues are more relevant for social ones. This paper shows tha...

Cortical and subcortical gray matter volumes were correlated with a set of linguistic scores in a group of schizophrenia patients. Lexical informativeness was positively associated with the volume of the left frontal cortical and accumbal areas, while left hippocampal atrophy and right ventricle enlargement predicted increased production of semantic paraphasias. Global coherence impairment was ...

In this paper, we propose a novel topic model based on incorporating dictionary definitions. Traditional topic models treat words as surface strings without assuming predefined knowledge about word meaning. They infer topics only by observing surface word co-occurrence. However, the co-occurred words may not be semantically related in a manner that is relevant for topic coherence. Exploiting di...

This paper proposes a method for measuring semantic similarity between words as a new tool for text analysis. The similarity is measured on a semantic network constructed systematically from a subset of the English dictionary, LDOCE (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Spreading activation on the network can directly compute the similarity between any two words in the Longman De ning V...

Enriching linguistic resources with domain information has been considered one important target in natural language applications. This domain information can be undoubtedly provided by subject specific definitions. However, definition extraction of this domain information from specialized resources has revealed certain methodological problems in definition construction. This paper presents some...

It's taken a good three years to squeeze this collection of workshop papers through the publishing pipeline. No great matter: the state of the art in lexical acquisition is still much as it was. Editor Zernik has used the time to impose some coherence on the multi-disciplinary material by adding a substantial introduction, and at least some of the authors have cross-referenced their papers to o...

We present a classification model that predicts the presence or omission of a lexical connective between two clauses, based upon linguistic features of the clauses and the type of discourse relation holding between them. The model is trained on a set of high frequency relations extracted from the Penn Discourse Treebank and achieves an accuracy of 86.6%. Analysis of the results reveals that the...