Discourses are the collaborative activities of (human) agents who have purposes for communicating. Discourse structure includes the purposes of those agents, which I take, following [GroszSid86], to be formally expressible as intentions and beliefs. While the theory of discourse structures has influenced how many computational linguists think about discourse processing, it does not preclude car...

the aim of this paper is to show that modern media are not totally independent of the older media and that there is, specifically, a kind of language transfer from older media such as television to the modern ones. although internet users enjoy relatively more freedom in the virtual reality public domains compared with real public domains, their political communications in negotiation rooms are...

We take em-dash as our sample punctuation mark and examine its usage from a discourse perspective, using sentences from well-known corpora. We particularly comment on how dashes can give hints on information structure, focus, and anaphora. Throughout the paper Discourse Representation Theory is used as a framework.

In this paper I propose that the principles of Emergent Grammar (Hopper 1987, 1998) can be applied to lexical semantics. I discuss three instances of discourse semantics to show why an emergent view of semantics can provide a realistic account of semantics in discourse. The three cases are: 1) emergence and negotiation of meaning due to participant interaction in discourse; 2) (re)distribution ...

This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spontaneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boundary tones are enhanced to mark information structuring. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a prosodic...

This paper examines from the perspective of discourse analysis the rhetoric of negotiation in the area of nanomedicine and compares it to the debate on genetic engineering. The following questions will be raised: what kind of symbolic space is generated by the negotiations and what role does this space play in determining the possibilities for communication regarding future nanotechnological in...

Discourse markers are words or phrases that speakers use at the beginning of a contribution to signal how it relates to prior discourse. They mark changes in the global discourse structure by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic or the return to a previous topic. However, words that are used as discourse markers often also have a sentential function. If discourse markers are to be used ...

This paper attempts to present innovations brought into corpus methodology by using the concept of paraphrase to account for the meaning of lexical items. Collaborative knowledge building is conceived of not merely the individual introduction of paraphrases discussing the features of the discourse objects but continuous subsequent negotiation of this input over a temporal arrow. With proposal o...

In this paper we will present our ongoing work on a plan-based discourse processor developed in the context of the Enthusiast Spanish to English translation system as part of the JANUS multilingual speech-to-speech translation system. We will demonstrate that theories of discourse which postulate a strict tree structure of discourse on either the intentional or attentional level are not totally...