1. Introduction When speakers describe objects, events, and future courses of action taking place in a spatially-extended world, they use a variety of expressions whose alternation pattern has been said to mark proximity. The aim of this paper is to investigate this feature of spoken discourse that occurs often in dialog produced by partners collaborating on tasks in 3D space. In English, the e...

For the past two decades linguists working within the framework of systemic functional linguistics have been developing appraisal theory as a tool for analysing evaluation in discourse. In this talk I will present a brief overview of the current model and then move on to address a number of the challenges that have arisen over the years including distinguishing inscribed from invoked attitude, ...

WHEN PAUL WRITES HIS DISCOURSE ON THE CROSS IN 1 CORINTHIANS 1-2, HE IS addressing a church divided by competing ideologies and ego struggles. The issues that divide the Corinthians are familiar enough in our own day: in chapter 1, it is baptism; in chapters 9-11, the Lord’s supper; in chapters 12-14, ministry and worship. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 reveal that Paul’s hearers are divided about sexual...

The German words nicht and etwa can be used in two very different ways. Under one use, nicht semantically resembles the clausal negation marker not in English, while the word etwa is close in meaning to the adverb approximately. In this use, nicht and etwa affect the truth-conditions of the sentence, just as their English equivalents. But nicht and etwa can also be truth-conditionally inert wit...

This paper proposes the use of an immersive virtual environment, Second Life, for enactive role play to help students recognize and solve conflicts through argument-based negotiation. An important core of the epistemology of negotiation is that stakeholders in a dispute have legitimate conflicting interests, and the goal of negotiation is to reconcile those interests in an equitable manner give...

How to establish an online space of discourse that lives on interaction organized into a dialogue? This text provides an analysis of the social dynamics of several modes of interaction between students of “Technology Assessment” in a University of Applied Science. The web-based negotiation game “Surfing Global Change” SGC (© with the author) delivers a set of rules for guided online discussion ...

Efficient agent communication in open and dynamic environments relies on the agents ability to reach a mutual understanding over message exchanges. Such environments are characterized by the existence of heterogeneous agents that commit to different ontologies, with no prior assumptions regarding the use of shared vocabularies. Various approaches have therefore considered how mutually acceptabl...