An account of utterance interpretation in discourse needs to face the issue of how the discourse context controls the space of interacting preferences. Assuming a discourse processing architecture that distinguishes the grammar and pragmatics subsystems in terms of monotonic and nonmonotonic inferences, I will discuss how independently motivated default preferences interact in the interpretatio...

Discourse relations in the recent literature are typically classified as either explicit (e.g., when a discourse connective like “because” is present) or implicit. This binary treatment of implicitness is advantageous for simplifying the explanation of many phenomena in discourse processing. On the other hand, linguists do not yet agree as to what types of textual particles contribute to reveal...

We examined the brain areas involved in discourse processing by using functional MRI in 10 individuals as they read paragraphs, with or without a title, word by word for comprehension. Functional data were collected from 20 adjacent 5 mm axial slices. Discourse processing was associated with activation in inferior frontal and temporal regions of both cerebral hemispheres in the titled and untit...

Symptomatic of a contemporary concern with affective factors in cognitive processing, a corpus of research is now emerging on the role of interestingness in discourse processing. This research has concentrated on narrative prose and has adopted o structural approach, arguing for the centrality of event and discourse structure in producing an affect like interest. The authors point out that this...

VP-ellipsis and sluicing are forms of ellipsis that can cross a sentence boundary. We present a series of comprehension studies on these forms of ellipsis to elucidate their processing and the relation of syntactic and discourse processing. One set of studies examines the hypothesis that the representation of elided material is syntactically structured. We present evidence supporting the hypoth...

This introduction tracks the evolution of the definition and role of discourse issues in NLP from the knowledge-intensive “discourse understanding” methods of the 80’s to the recent concern with “accessing contents” in vast document bases via data-intensive methods. As text/discourse linguistics moves toward corpus approaches, also in connection with the development of large text bases and of c...

In this paper, we introduce LiveTree, a core component of LIDAS, the Linguistic Discourse Analysis System for automatic discourse parsing with the Unified Linguistic Discourse Model (U-LDM) (X et al, 2004). LiveTree is an integrated workbench for supervised and unsupervised creation, storage and manipulation of the discourse structure of text documents under the U-LDM. The LiveTree environment ...

A large number of experiments reveals that language comprehension is generally incremental and even predictive (e.g., Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995). However, there is also evidence that incoming information across the sentence level does not always immediately update local predictions and affect global interpretation (Sanford & Garrod, 1998). The question therefore is which information from the ...