Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

Scientific communication demands more than the mere listing of empirical findings or assertion of beliefs. Arguments must be constructed to motivate problems, expose weaknesses, justify higher-order concepts, and support claims to be advancing the field. Researchers learn to signal clearly in their writing when they are making such moves, and the progress of natural language processing technolo...

Argumentative Reasoning Theory (ART) is a theory of knowledge representation, reasoning, explanation, and argument interaction. It is designed to support intelligent human-computer collaboration. ART provides the ability to represent reasoning in a form that is computable, intuitive, and amenable to discovery. By integrating Toulmin’s model of argumentation, Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Struc...

descriptive tasks that will enable them to answer questions about how social life proceeds, and then they work toward explaining more formally why patterns appear in their data. Making the transition from ‘how?’ to ‘why?’ can be a dilemma, but the ethnographer’s folk culture provides facilitating resources for detecting and appreciating especially compelling descriptions. Recognitions of lumino...

This study describes a discourse approach to explanation aware knowledge representation. It presents a reasoning model that adheres to argumentation as found in written discourse, intended for use in intelligent human-computer collaboration and inter-agent deliberation. The approach integrates the Toulmin model with Rhetorical Structure Theory and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s (1958) strategi...

Attentional State Theory and Rhetorical Structure Theory are two predominant theories of discourse parsing. Combining these two approaches, in this paper, we describe a novel approach for discourse parsing. The resulting discourse tree structure retains following properties: structure of purpose from Attentional State Theory and relations between sentences from Rhetorical Structure Theory. We d...

This paper introduces the concept of myth, a dominant image on which an organizing vision may be formulated. It is proposed that organizational myths can be used to evaluate the nature and outcomes of information technology use in particular operating contexts, by permitting an enframing or disclosure of critical contradictions and tensions arising in such contexts. An analytical schema, the se...

This article focuses on some principles for understanding. By taking Anna Mikulak's article "Mismatches between 'scientific' and 'non-scientific' ways of knowing and their contributions to public understanding of science" (IPBS 2011) as a point of departure, the idea of demarcation criteria for scientific and non-scientific discourses is addressed. Yet this is juxtaposed with mythical thinking,...

Swearing produces effects that are not observed with other forms of language use. Thus, swearing is powerful. It generates a range distinctive outcomes: physiological, cognitive, emotional, pain-relieving, interactional and rhetorical. However, we know the power intrinsic to words themselves. Hence, our starting question is: How does get its power? In this Overview Paper, aim threefold. (1) We ...

This paper addresses two basic questions about polarity items: what sorts of meaning can such forms encode and why should such forms exist in the first place. My starting point is the Scalar Model of Polarity (Israel 1996, 1998), which predicts a reliable correlation between a polarity item’s sensitivity and its scalar semantic properties: specifically, it predicts that forms denoting a minimal...