This qualitative case study illustrates barriers to informal argumentation and reasoned debate, i.e., critical discourse, in online forums. The case is the computer conference of a 15-week, graduate-level humanities course offered entirely at a distance. Twelve students, all with families and careers, were enrolled in the course. We read all messages as they were posted and interviewed five of ...

Three reading-time experiments in Chinese are reported that test contrasting views of how pronominal coreference is achieved. On the one hand, studies of reading time and eye tracking suggest that reduced expressions, such as the pronoun he, serve as critical links to integrate separate utterances into a coherent model of discourse. On the other hand, probe-word recognition studies indicate tha...

Islamophobia’s occurrence in any particular country has little do with the presence of Muslim; it is possible to be Islamophobic when there are virtually no Muslim around. This because the lack of Muslims is filled by the surplus of Islamophobic representations. This surplus of representations is now increasingly reliant on the internet. There are many studies reporting on Islamophobia on the i...

The study of discourse has become a major development in all disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Studies in Discourse will feature introductory books for the key domains and most relevant topics in this exciting new cross-discipline. The series aims to stimulate teaching and research on discourse in linguistics, literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology, communications ...

the present study is an attempt to offer a study of the researchers' views regarding the interaction between literature and human discoursal interactions through a comparative, descriptive, and analytical approach. five variables of discourse experimentation, research and educational consequences, anthropology, pragmatics, and intertextuality are investigated. the results of the study reve...

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how information and communications technology (ICT) has become deeply involved in the conception and practice of socio-economic development within so-called less-developed countries (LDCs). A recent speech on ICT by the president of the World Bank Group is examined, which shows the role of the discourse surrounding such technologies in ...

Computational theories of discourse are concerned with the context-based interpretation or generation of discourse phenomena in text and dialogue. In the past, research in this area focused on specifying the mechanisms underlying particular discourse phenomena; the models proposed were often motivated by a few constructed examples. While this approach led to many theoretical advances, models de...

there remains a conviction that the torrent of publications and the financial outlay on leadership development will create managers with the skills and characters of perfect leaders, capable of guiding healthcare organisations through the challenges and crises of the 21st century. the focus of much attention continues to be the search for the (illusory) core set of heroic qualities, abilities o...