Previous experimental studies on concessive connectives have only looked at their local facilitating or predictive effect on discourse relation comprehension and have often viewed them as a class of discourse markers with similar effects. We look into the effect of two connectives, but and although, for inferring contrastive vs. concessive discourse relations to complement previous experimental...

To understand a speaker's turn of a conversation, one needs to segment it into intonational phrases, clean up any speech repairs that might have occurred, and identify discourse markers. In this paper, we argue that these problems must be resolved together, and that they must be resolved early in the processing stream. We put forward a statistical language model that resolves these problems, do...

Bresnan (1994), based on data in English and Chicheŵa, proposes that the discourse function of locative inversion construction (LIC) is presentational focus, in which the referent of the NP ‘is introduced or reintroduced on the (part of the) scene referred to by the preposed locative’. Pan (1996) suggests that the discourse function of LIC in Chinese is the same. In this paper, I investigate tw...

Recently, studies on spoken language in real-life contexts increased dramatically. As a result, some of the features previously considered „empty‟, „superfluous‟ and redundantsuch as sort of, y‟know and well (Goddard and Meanpatterson, 2000, p. 98) now are considered as crucial aspects of interpersonal communication. These expressions called „discourse markers‟ (Schiffrin, 1987) or „pragmatic e...