This study investigated the possible pragmatic change concerning the narrative production of older adults. Brazilian young and older adults residing in Porto Alegre/BR were instructed to tell personal and fictitious stories. Propositions of their discourse were analyzed in terms of relevance, subjectivity and repetition. Older adults presented a greater proportion of indirectly relevant proposi...

The temporal interpretation of events is crucial to many applications of natural language understanding. Interpreting events as described in individual utterances and discourse requires both semantic and pragmatic processing. We develop representations for events that reflect the internal structure of different situation types. We propose semantic constraints through which the representations o...

This paper examines the possibility of technology supporting and facilitating the organisation and development of knowledge in a particular field through critical discourse. Three examples of discourse-structuring technologies have been investigated to determine whether selected software might support critical discourse to capture the knowledge required to structure academic debate. It is envis...

This research provides further data regarding non-literal language comprehension following right hemisphere damage (RHD). To assess the impact of RHD on the processing of non-literal language, ten participants presenting with RHD and ten matched healthy control participants were administered tasks tapping humour appreciation and pragmatic interpretation of non-literal language. Although the RHD...

Linguistic theories typically assign various linguistic phenomena to one of the categories, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic, as if the phenomena in each category were relatively independent of those in the others. However, various phenomena in discourse do not seem to yield comfortably to any account that is strictly a syntactic or semantic or pragmatic one. This paper focuses on part icular ...

The aim of this paper is to contribute learner corpus research into formulaic language in native and non-native German. To effect, a argumentative essays written by advanced British students German (WHiG) was compared with speakers (Falko-L1). A corpus-driven analysis reveals larger number 3-grams WHiG than Falko-L1, which suggests that learners are more likely use writing their native-speaker ...

This paper investigates an alternation found with definite noun phrases in direct object position in Romanian that represents a theoretical puzzle for current theories of Differential Object Marking in this language (Gramatica Limbii Române 2005, Klein & de Swart 2011). When in direct object position and unmodified, definite noun phrases can be accompanied either by the differential object mark...

This paper presents results of an empirical analysis on the structuring of spoken discourse focusing upon how some particular utterance components in Chinese spoken dialogues are highlighted. A restricted number of words frequently and regularly found within utterances structure the dialogues by marking certain significant locations. Furthermore, a variety of signals of monitoring and repairing...

In this paper we discuss the interdependence of scalar implicatures and discourse structuring questions. We show that even prototypical cases of scalar implicatures can depend on an explicitly or implicitly given Question under Discussion. Particularly, we argue against the idea that scalar implicatures are automatically generated by the logical form of an utterance. We distinguish between thre...