the present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced iranian learners of english as a foreign language. the study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and wh-clefts. after taking the nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

This paper analyzes anaphoric links in conditional and quantificational structures in which more than one operator occurs. To this end, we adopt the indexing system and the basic principles of Dynamic Discourse Representation Theory proposed by Chung (2008a, 2008b, 2009) and extend them to the structures in question. We also propose that a restrictor discourse representation structure of a quan...

Discourse information, as postulated by popular discourse theories, such RST and PDTB, has been shown to improve an increasing number of downstream NLP tasks, showing positive effects synergies with important real-world applications. While methods for incorporating become more sophisticated, the growing need robust general structures not sufficiently met current parsers, usually trained on smal...

Descriptions. In recent years, both formal and computational linguistics have been exploiting descriptions of structures where previously the structures themselves were used. The practice started with (Marcus et al., 1983), who demonstrated the value of (syntactic) tree descriptions for near-deterministic incremental parsing. Vijay-Shankar (Vijay-Shankar and Joshi, 1988; Vijay-Shankar, 1992) us...

2. A b s t r a c t D iscou rse R e v i s i o n : I t iteratively applies revision operators to the abstract discourse plan to create a draft tree, where each node is a draft that was derived from its parent by applying a revision operator. Figure 4: Example sentential specification 3. D iscourse P l a n G r o u n d i n g : I t reconstitutes abstract discourse plans as ground level discourse pla...

The paper deals with the cohesion part of a model of global discourse interpretation, usually known as Veins Theory (VT). By taking from the Rhetorical Structure Theory the notions of nuclearity and relations, but ignoring the relations’ names, VT computes from rhetorical structures strings of discourse units, called veins, from which domains of accessibility can be determined for each discours...

1. Introduction This paper presents psycholinguistic data from three magnitude estimation experiments that suggest a syntactic parallelism condition on VP ellipsis (VPE) that can be modulated by discourse coherence, and applies to VPE both within and across sentences. Section 1 will outline some of the arguments for and against syntactic and semantic accounts of VPE, and lay out the predictions...

This study aimed to examine the effect of flexible group collaboration on students’ constructive discourse in a principle-based CSCL environment. The participants included 27 Chinese undergraduate students taking a 16-week introductory research methods course. The online discourse adopted a flexible collaboration structure: fixed small group collaboration in the first eight weeks, and opportuni...

An algorithm was implemented for automatically generating tree-like discourse structures. This was used to generate a variety of discourse trees by using diierent attachment rules. The information used by these rules was essentially referential, and included continuity of theme, temporal reference, and pronominalisation in general. The trees in turn formed the basis for reference resolution, in...