Cue phrases are linguistic expressions such as now and well that function as explicit indicators of the structure of a discourse. For example, now may signal the beginning of a subtopic or a return to a previous topic, while well may mark subsequent material as a response to prior material, or as an explanatory comment. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each also has on...

In this paper the perceptual evaluation of a method to analyse the information structure of a discourse (Van Donzel, 1994) is discussed. In this evaluation listeners were presented with spoken versions of a retold story in Dutch, and were asked to mark those parts in the text they perceived as being emphasized, under the assumption that these are the most salient parts of the discourse. The res...

Both rhetorical structure and punctuation have been helpful in discourse processing. Based on a corpus annotation project, this paper reports the discursive usage of 6 Chinese punctuation marks in news commentary texts: Colon, Dash, Ellipsis, Exclamation Mark, Question Mark, and Semicolon. The rhetorical patterns of these marks are compared against patterns around cue phrases in general. Result...

We link generative dependency grammars meeting natural modularity requirements with underspecified semantics of Discourse Plans intended to account for exactly those meaning components that grammars of languages mark for. We complete this link with a natural compilation of the modular dependency grammars into strongly equivalent efficiently analysed categorial dependency grammars.

The Annotation Ontology (AO) has proven to be a valuable resource for structuring annotations in scientific documents. We are representing elements of discourse with the AO; by using our proposed extension it is possible to mark up specific rhetorical structures and build a network of interconnected documents. The extension presented in this paper also makes it possible to represent more expres...

Negotiation, as an interactional strategy and proactive focus on form (FoF) have received increased attention in second language research. The combination of negotiation and proactive FoF, however, has not been examined in relation to L2 vocabulary learning. To address this gap, the present study investigated how the amount of negotiation and proactive FoF impacted learners’ vocabulary knowledg...

Phenomenological assumptions—assumptions about the fundamental qualities of the phenomenon being studied and how it relates to the environment in which it occurs—affect the dissemination of knowledge from subfields to the broader field of study. Micro-process research in organizational studies rests on implicit phenomenological assumptions that vary in the extent to which micro-processes are vi...

Vivas have multiple functions in academia, but their main goal is completing thesis evaluation. At the heart of this evaluation is a series of criticisms and their responsive turns by which participants talk vivas as institution into being (Heritage, 1997). Turn-taking is one of the many ways vivas are talked into being. This study drew upon conversation analysis to look into the turn allocatio...