In this article, the author reviews the manner in which researchers characterize data. Normality, standard deviation, mean, and other concepts related to parametric statistics are discussed in common language, with a minimum of jargon and with clinical examples.

Discourse relations can be expressed with or without their explicit cues: “The streets are wet because] it was raining”. In the latter case they are called implicit, as the inference relies only on the content of the arguments. The question here is whether language users prefer causal relations to other types of relations in the absence of cues. We elaborate on some related hypotheses such fort...