BACKGROUND Considering the cognitive and linguistic complexity of discourse production, it is expected that individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) should face difficulties in this task. Therefore, clinical examination of discourse has become a useful tool for studying and assessment of communication skills of people suffering from TBI. Among different genres of discourse, persuasive disc...

The following main ideas have been pointed out and put to work within our paper: (a) Information Structure (IS) theories (topic-focus, theme-rheme, background-contrast, informational and contrastive focus, focus projection rules, etc.) on text are shown to behave currently as a consistent linguistic tool that can stand behind a correct, language and contextual-depending, mapping of text into sp...

Three experiments investigated how font emphasis influences reading and remembering discourse. Although past work suggests that contrastive pitch contours benefit memory by promoting encoding of salient alternatives, it is unclear both whether this effect generalizes to other forms of linguistic prominence and how the set of alternatives is constrained. Participants read discourses in which som...

In stress-accent languages such as English and Dutch, pitch accent is used as the primary cue for contrastive focus, a mechanism to indicate correction or emphasis in discourse. A well-known fact about Chinese is that pitch change is used to indicate tones for lexical contrasts. This study examines how an alternative acoustic cue duration – is used to signal contrastive focus in Beijing Mandari...

BACKGROUND The PRC Adaptive Knowledge-based Text Understanding System (PAKTUS) has been unde r development as an Independent Research and Development project at PRC since 1984 . It includes a core English lexicon and grammar, a concept network, processes for applying these to lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis, and tools that support the adaptation of the generi c core to new ...

In this paper, we analyse alignment discrepancies for discourse structures in English-German parallel data – sentence pairs, in which discourse structures in target or source texts have no alignment in the corresponding parallel sentences. The discourse-related structures are designed in form of linguistic patterns based on the information delivered by automatic part-of-speech and dependency an...