Purpose – To provide an analysis of the notion of “information poverty” in library and information science (LIS) by investigating concepts, interests and strategies leading to its construction and thus to examine its role as a constitutive element of the professional discourse. Design/methodology/approach – Starting from a Foucauldian notion of discourse, “information poverty” is examined as a ...

this paper discussed the discursive strategies in selected political rally campaigns of the 2011 elections in southwestern nigeria with a view to revealing the dynamics of political persuasion and mobilization in contemporary natural political communication in nigeria. the data for the study were obtained from two political rallies in each of the six southwestern states in nigeria, making a tot...

We present the results from a series of experiments aimed at uncovering the discourse structure of man-machine communication in natural language (Wizard of Oz experiments). The results suggest the existence of different classes of dialogue situations, requiring computational discourse representations of various complexity. Important factors seem to be the number of different permissible tasks i...

In this work we explore the possibility of formalizing explanations based in the notion “deletion under recoverability”: information should be omitted in expressions if that information can be recovered without being overtly expressed – e.g., from information already encoded in the state of the discourse. This style of explanation is difficult to formalize for many reasons, among them that the ...

The article focuses on studying male and female speech behaviour in two national variants of English – British and American – and research in realizing the rich potential of meanings developing in modern English dialogue discourse. The analysis is not only based on functional and pragmatic approach to language study but also centers on modern trends in cognitive linguistics. The latest achievem...

This paper proposes a general framework for the semantics of honorific expressions, including honorific pronouns, morphology, and discourse particles. Such expressions are claimed to indicate a level of politeness which must be compatible with a level of formality fixed by the discourse context together with sociolinguistic factors, and, with their use, to change the range of formality the cont...

Clausally introduced entities in English are more frequently accessible to reference with a demonstrative pronoun than with the personal pronoun it. This fact can be explained on the assumption that such entities are typically activated, but not brought into focus, immediately subsequent to their introduction into a discourse. However, clausally introduced entities are, in fact, sometimes refer...

(1)a. « Stress and intonation in English have been commonly regarded as « mere stylistic factors » which do not contribute to the essential meaning of sentences. In this chapter we will begin to construct an account of the semantic effects of these phonological phenomena and show how they fit into the general theory proposed here and into a possible theory of discourse. » Jackendoff (1972 : 229...

Comprehension deficits of spoken language have been widely described subsequent to damage to the left hemisphere (Nicholas and Brookshire, 1995). Research to date has primarily focused on comprehension of isolated words or sentences in persons with aphasia (pwa) (Yasuda, Nakamura & Beckman 2000). However, a few studies have suggested that pwa use heuristics (context and general knowledge) to fa...

This study explores the impact of visual context on the conceptual salience of a discourse entity, using descriptions of how to find specific targets in cartoon scenes. Significant positive correlation is observed between larger and more salient objects and definite expressions, whereas more cluttered images are positively related to indefinite expressions. Incorporating these findings with oth...