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...

During thc past two decades, much work in linguistics has focused on sentences as minimal units of communication, and the project of rigorously characterizing the structure of sentences in natural language has met with some succcss. Not surprisingly, however, sentcnce grammars have contributed little to the analysis of discourse, Human discourse consists not just of words in sequences, hut of w...

We present the results from a series of experiments aimed at uncovering the discourse structure of man-machine communication in natural language (Wizard of Oz experiments). The results suggest the existence of different classes of dialogue situations, requiring computational discourse representations of various complexity. Important factors seem to be the number of different permissible tasks i...

This study attempts to investigate the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic development of Iranian EFL learners cross-sectionally when making requests in different situations. To this end, 103 university students in three proficiency levels of pre-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced were asked to write three discourse completion tests (DCTs) of requests in different situations...

PURPOSE To understand risk-related practices of older adults returning home posthospitalization. RESEARCH DESIGN Qualitative methods informed by critical discourse theory, designed to uncover linkages between broader social practices and peoples' talk and stories, were used. METHODS Eight older adults, screened as high-risk from an inpatient cardiology unit, and six partners were interviewe...

I argue that an action-based model of belief update is largely compatible with the proposals advanced in the literature on formal approaches to discourse interpretation, especially the recent work by Asher and Kamp, yet allows for a close integration between the processes tracking the attentional state and performing intention recognition. In addition, I show that this kind of model, once augme...

In a series of recent papers (Cristea and Webber, 1997; Webber and Joshi, 1998; Webber et al., 1999a; Webber et al., 1999b), we have argued for starting the analysis of discourse in the same way as one starts the analysis of a clause, looking at how its syntax and semantics project from the lexicon. This is complementary to the issue of discourse pragmatics – how these small syntactic units of ...