In French, the prosody associated with post-focus sequences is usually described a steadily flat, the suppression of any tonal variation being explained by the semantic and pragmatic content of these sequences. This paper aims to show that postfocus sequences may be realized in different ways. An experimental analysis of various post-focus sequences has shown that three distinct prosodic realiz...

We present an operable definition of focus which is argued to be of a cognito-pragmatic nature and explore how it is determined in discourse in a formalized manner. For this purpose, a file card model of discourse model and knowledge store is introduced enabling the decomposition and formal representation of its determination process as a programmable algorithm (FDA). Interdisciplinary evidence...

This study examined what discourse markers (DM) and their characteristics are in English. It described the range of uses of English discourse markers in conversations included in Interchange books. It also determined the most frequently used discourse markers. It was found that "oh" and "well" were the most frequently used discourse markers in the conversations, and then the functions of them w...

Three approaches to the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) are identified, the Critical approach, the Pragmatic approach, and the Critical Pragmatic approach. Critical EAP is appealing pedagogically because of its restive questioning of discourse norms, although it can seem reactionary at times. By focusing on the acquisition of the same dominant norms, Pragmatic EAP has a clear go...

The paper gives a contrastive analysis of the two semantic categories specificity and definiteness. It argues against the traditional picture that assumes that specific expressions are a subclass of indefinite NPs. The paper rather assumes that the two categories are independent of each other. Definiteness expresses the discourse pragmatic property of familiarity, while specificity mirrors a mo...

In this paper, we will focus on the development, implementation, and evolution of a discourse model which is used to computationally instantiate a discourse structure in individual texts. This discourse model was developed for use in a Text Structuring module that recognizes discourse-level structure within a large-scale information retrieval system, DR-LINK (Liddy Myaeng, 1993). The Text Struc...

Drawing appropriate defeasible inferences has been proven to be one of the most pervasive puzzles of natural language processing and a recurrent problem in pragmatics. This paper provides a theoretical framework, called stratified logic, that can accommodate defeasible pragmatic inferences. The framework yields an algorithm that computes the conversational, conventional, scalar, clausal, and no...

This study examined the psychometric aspects of a verbal pragmatic rating scale. The scale contained six pragmatic features (i.e., Conciseness, Lexical Selection, Quantity, Relevancy, Specificity, and Topic Maintenance) based on Grice's cooperative principles. Fifteen right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 left brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 healthy normal control (NC) right-handed adult participants produ...

Increased advances in communication technology have enabled computermediated communication among geographically dispersed individuals, and created opportunities for them to participate in socio-political decisions at the local, national and global level. Consequently, the structuring of communication processes for facilitating discourse among larger groups of individuals becomes a challenge. De...

We present a semantic theory of causal discourse which allows us to derive expectations about upcoming discourse, specifically when to expect various types of explanations. We apply our theory to the phenomenon of implicit causality and show how the semantics of implicit causality verbs interacts with discourse structure. In particular, we show why certain verbs trigger explanations per default...