Making Sense of Discourse. On Discourse Segmentation and the Linguistic Marking of Coherence Relations

Making Sense of Discourse. On Discourse Segmentation and the Linguistic Marking of Coherence Relations
Author: Jet Hoek
Publisher:
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN: 9789460932946

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When people read or listen to a discourse, they will try to make sense of it. To fully understand a discourse, it is essential not only to know the meaning of each individual clause, but also to figure out how all clauses are related to each other. If all goes well, language users end up with an accurate representation of the discourse. An important aspect of building a mental representation of a discourse is inferring coherence relations between discourse segments. When inferring coherence relations, language users have to deduce whether two or more chunks of text constitute, for instance, a cause-consequence relation, a rule and an exception, alternatives, etc. Coherence relations can be explicitly marked by a connective (e.g., because, although) or a cue phrase (e.g., except for the fact that, by comparison), but this need not be the case; in many instances, coherence relations have to be established without the instructions connectives provide or, in the case of underspecified connectives, with only limited instructions.00This dissertation investigates both discourse segmentation and the linguistic marking of coherence relations. Using a combination of theoretical exploration, parallel corpus studies, and experimental methods, it provides new insights into how and why coherence relations are explicitly signaled and between which parts of a text people infer coherence relations.In addition, it contributes toward refining discourse segmentation and annotation guidelines, both of which are important methodological tools in the research of discourse coherence.0.

Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse

Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse
Author: Óscar Loureda
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027262268

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This volume assembles eleven articles addressing current concerns in discourse studies from an empirical perspective. Engaging with highly topical issues, they indicate the potential of an approach to the construction of discourse via corpus-based analysis, experimentation, or combined methodologies. The subject matters of the contributions, delivered by renowned scholars and dealing with either one or several languages, range from mechanisms through which information structure, connection and discourse organization are realized, to prosody as a determinant of hierarchy and specific functions of discourse markers, as well as innovative tools for visualizing discourse structure. The resulting volume addresses scholars working in a variety of topics, who either wish to incorporate empirical methods to their research or whose work is already empirically oriented and wish to gain insight into empirical evidence on state-of-the-art discursive phenomena.

Making Sense of Discourse Analysis

Making Sense of Discourse Analysis
Author: Brian Paltridge
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2000
Genre: Discourse analysis
ISBN:

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"Making sense of discourse analysis brings together the key systems of discourse analysis. The book overviews and explains communicative language theory, speech act theory, conversational analysis, genre analysis, and critical discourse analysis. Each chapter provides a historical context, definitions for key components of each system or theory being described, textual examples with explanation, and structured activities for readers to try out the systems and theories for themselves." --p. v.

Shallow Discourse Parsing for German

Shallow Discourse Parsing for German
Author: P. Bourgonje
Publisher: IOS Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1643681931

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The last few decades have seen impressive improvements in several areas of Natural Language Processing. Nevertheless, getting a computer to make sense of the discourse of utterances in a text remains challenging. Several different theories which aim to describe and analyze the coherent structure of a well-written text exist, but with varying degrees of applicability and feasibility for practical use. This book is about shallow discourse parsing, following the paradigm of the Penn Discourse TreeBank, a corpus containing over 1 million words annotated for discourse relations. When it comes to discourse processing, any language other than English must be considered a low-resource language. This book relates to discourse parsing for German. The limited availability of annotated data for German means that the potential of modern, deep-learning-based methods relying on such data is also limited. This book explores to what extent machine-learning and more recent deep-learning-based methods can be combined with traditional, linguistic feature engineering to improve performance for the discourse parsing task. The end-to-end shallow discourse parser for German developed for the purpose of this book is open-source and available online. Work has also been carried out on several connective lexicons in different languages. Strategies are discussed for creating or further developing such lexicons for a given language, as are suggestions on how to further increase their usefulness for shallow discourse parsing. The book will be of interest to all whose work involves Natural Language Processing, particularly in languages other than English.

The Texture of Discourse

The Texture of Discourse
Author: Jan Renkema
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027232660

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The aim of this monograph is to give impetus to research into one of the central questions in discourse studies: what makes a sequence of sentences or utterances a discourse? The theoretical framework for describing the possibilities of discourse continuation is delineated by two principles: the discursive and the dialogic principle. The chord of discourse is unfolded in a tripartite wire: Conjunction, Adjunction and Interjunction, each containing three aspects, leading to a Connectivity Model. This new three-by-three taxonomy of discourse relations incorporates findings from several theories and approaches that have evolved over the last three decades, including Systemic Functional Linguistics and Rhetorical Structure Theory. In comparing this model to other models, this book presents a state-of-the-art of discourse relation analysis combined with detailed accounts of many examples. This monograph furthermore proposes a new way of presenting discourse structures in connectivity graphs followed by eleven commandments for the segmentation and labeling of discourse, and three procedures for disambiguation if more labels are applicable. This study can provide a base for corpus linguistic analysis on discourse structures, computational approaches to discourse generation and cognitive experimental research of discourse competence."

(In)coherence of Discourse

(In)coherence of Discourse
Author: Maxime Amblard
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2021-06-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030714349

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This present book explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, in particular, new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia. The contributors examine the modeling paradigm of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics and logic while providing overlapping links with other fields such as philosophy of language and cognitive psychology. This book is based on results presented during the series of workshops on (In)Coherence and Discourse organized by SLAM (Schizophrenia and Language: Analysis and Modeling), a project developed to systemize the study of pathological language processing by taking an overarching interdisciplinary approach combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. The principle focus is on conversations produced by people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The contributions come from young and experienced researchers, and invited speakers. The book appeals to likeminded students and researchers.

Centering Theory in Discourse

Centering Theory in Discourse
Author: Marilyn A. Walker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 1998
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780198236870

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This edited collection of previously unpublished papers focuses on Centering Theory, an account of local discourse structure. Developed in the context of computational linguistics and cognitive science, Centering theory has attracted the attention of an international interdisciplinary audience. As the authors focus on naturally occurring data, they join the general trend towards empiricism in research on computational models of discourse, providing a significant contribution to a fast-moving field.

Marking Discourse Coherence and Social-Interpersonal Meaning

Marking Discourse Coherence and Social-Interpersonal Meaning
Author: Jung-ran Park
Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2009-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9783838308883

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Through cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives, this book uncovers unexplored areas of the semantic shifts and functional developments of discourse-pragmatic markers by examining historical and contemporary language usage of Korean and other languages. The discourse-pragmatic markers examined in this book evince multifaceted and multifunctional characteristics. On the textual level discourse-pragmatic markers build intra-textual coherence and sequential coordination; on the interpersonal level they index the speaker s epistemic and interpersonal stances in relation to interlocutors and upcoming discourse. The semantic shifts engendered through the metaphoric and metonymic processes and functional development of these markers manifest unidirectionality and regularity in semantic change. This book should be especially useful to researchers as well as graduate and advanced undergraduate students in disciplines dealing with language and culture in general, particularly linguistics and communications. Anyone interested in online social interaction and computer mediated communication across cultures will find valuable insights in this volume.

Discourse Topics

Discourse Topics
Author: Richard Watson Todd
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2016-11-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027266220

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Discourse topics are a frequently mentioned but rarely operationalised concept in linguistics. Taking a text linguistic approach and defining discourse topics as clusterings of concepts, this book examines and compares methods for investigating topic boundaries, topic identification and topic development. The first book to be devoted to topics in extended discourse, Discourse Topics examines topics in several genres and generates new insights into the nature of discourse topics that challenge the status quo. It is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing and psychology whose work concerns topics.