The prosody of a sentence (utterance) when it appears in a discourse context differs substantially from when it is uttered in isolation. This paper addresses why paragraph is a discourse unit and discourse prosody is an intrinsic part of naturally occurring speech. Higher level discourse information treats sentences, phrases and their lower level units as sub-units and layers over them; and rea...

It has been suggested that a referent’s accessibility is affected by the degree to which it is in the speaker’s attention. Assuming that less accessible referents are less likely to be pronominalized, this predicts that speakers under cognitive load use more elaborate referring expressions. However, speakers under load may also have difficulty taking into account their addressee’s perspective, ...

As referents are more accessible in discourse, they can be referred to with more attenuated expressions, such as pronouns. Accessibility is known to be affected by the referent’s saliency in the linguistic context, but much less is known about the effect of saliency in the visual context. In this paper, we investigate whether a referent’s visual saliency affects the choice of referring expressi...

The role of using meta-discourse elements in writing, especially in research newspapers, is so important that their authors can convey certainty, doubt, and characteristics of the writers in their writings. There are different meta-discourse markers used by various authors in different branches; for example, hedges and boosters are the most important devices in writing. The meta-discourse eleme...

Discourse comprehension is a hallmark of human social behaviour and refers to the act of interpreting a written or spoken message by constructing mental representations that integrate incoming language with prior knowledge and experience. Here, we report a human lesion study (n = 145) that investigates the neural mechanisms underlying discourse comprehension (measured by the Discourse Comprehen...

The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian ...

To date, little research on pragmatic transfer has considered a multilingual situation where there is an interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Of interest was whether pragmatic transfer of refusals among three languages spoken by the same person occurs from L1 and L2 to L3, L1 to L2 and then to L3 or from L1 and L1 (if there are more than one L1) to L2. This study ai...

This paper presents a novel latent variable recurrent neural network architecture for jointly modeling sequences of words and (possibly latent) discourse relations between adjacent sentences. A recurrent neural network generates individual words, thus reaping the benefits of discriminatively-trained vector representations. The discourse relations are represented with a latent variable, which ca...

This paper presents a work-in-progress on the automatic analysis of discourse genre in non-elicited speech. The study is focused on the development of bottom-up methods for automatic validation of discourse typologies found in linguistic descriptions (prosodic, syntactic, pragmatic and/or contextual and situational cues). The linguistic classification examined here opposes five discourse genres...

Predicting the sense of a discourse relation is particularly challenging when connective markers are missing. To address this challenge, we propose a simple deep neural network approach that replaces manual feature extraction by introducing event vectors as an alternative representation, which can be pre-trained using a very large corpus, without explicit annotation. We model discourse argument...