Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Discourse connectives'

The scope of this work is certain linguistic elements which make no contribution towards the truth-conditional content of their utterances. Nevertheless, they play a crucial role in utterance interpretation. They function as constraints on the inferential computations the hearer performs in order to establish the relevance of the proposition in which they occur. The sort of expressions this work is concerned with are items like so, after all, you see, llowever and although in both English and their counterparts in the Syrian dialect of the Arabic language spoken in two cities, Lattakia and Homs. The framework of this study is supplied by Sperber and wilson who argue that relevance is the key to communication. This relevance-based framework is adopted by Blakemore (1987) in terms of whose ideas the English and the Syrian Arabic expressions are analysed as semantic constraints on relevance. The concept of a "discourse connective" adopted in this study differs greatly from those discourse analysts who use this term in a broader sense. In this study the term "discourse connective" is reserved for those expressions whose function is not to contribute to the truth-conditional content of their utterances rather to indicate how the interpretation of one utterance contributes to the interpretation of the other. As one expects similarities and differences between the English expressions and their Syrian counterparts arise but the similarities are much greater than the differences.

A text is a linguistic structure that is more than a random collection of sentences. A text is cohesive (Halliday &
Hasan, 1976) and coherent (Mann &
Thompson, 1987, 1988). Mainly ignored in the field of linguistics until recently, the text and the discourse structure have been inquired from various points of view (Asher, 1993
Asher &
Lascarides, 1998
Grosz &
Sidner, 1986
Mann &
Thompson, 1987, 1988
Webber, 2004). D-LTAG is a discourse grammar work that extends a lexicalized sentence level grammar LTAG (Joshi, 1987) to low-level discourse (Webber, 2004
Webber &
Joshi, 1998). In this framework, discourse connectives such as coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, parallel connectives and discourse adverbials are predicates of discourse structure that take text spans that can be interpreted as abstract objects (Asher, 1993). Turkish has a flexible word order in comparison to languages like English. In English, the discourse adverbials are noted for their ability to occupy positions unavailable to other discourse connectives. In Turkish, word order of other discourse connectives, coordinators and subordinators are not expected to be as restricted. This thesis examines the connective position, argument order and the information structure of five Turkish discourse connectives in their eleven uses. The analyses show that the examined features of discourse connectives are related to the syntactic group the connective belongs to. Discourse connectives of the same syntactic groups exploit similar connective position and argument order possibilities, and they tend to be included in similar information units.

This thesis is a descriptive study of four contrastive discourse connectives in Turkish. The main aim of this study is to analyze the connectives with respect to their meaning and predicate-argument structure and lay out the similarities and differences among contrastive discourse connectives with the help of quantitative analysis. Although the study is limited with contrastive connectives, it will have implications on how to resolve discourse structure in general and illustrate how lexico-syntactic elements contribute to discourse semantics.

This thesis considers the automatic acquisition of knowledge about discourse connectives. It focuses in particular on their semantic properties, and on the relationships that hold between them. There is a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work on discourse connectives. For example, Knott (1996) motivates a taxonomy of discourse connectives based on relationships between them, such as HYPONYMY and EXCLUSIVE, which are defined in terms of substitution tests. Such work requires either great theoretical insight or manual analysis of large quantities of data. As a result, to date no manual classification of English discourse connectives has achieved complete coverage. For example, Knott gives relationships between only about 18% of pairs obtained from a list of 350 discourse connectives. This thesis explores the possibility of classifying discourse connectives automatically, based on their distributions in texts. This thesis demonstrates that state-of-the-art techniques in lexical acquisition can successfully be applied to acquiring information about discourse connectives. Central to this thesis is the hypothesis that distributional similarity correlates positively with semantic similarity. Support for this hypothesis has previously been found for word classes such as nouns and verbs (Miller and Charles, 1991; Resnik and Diab, 2000, for example), but there has been little exploration of the degree to which it also holds for discourse connectives. We investigate the hypothesis through a number of machine learning experiments. These experiments all use unsupervised learning techniques, in the sense that they do not require any manually annotated data, although they do make use of an automatic parser. First, we show that a range of semantic properties of discourse connectives, such as polarity and veridicality (whether or not the semantics of a connective involves some underlying negation, and whether the connective implies the truth of its arguments, respectively), can be acquired automatically with a high degree of accuracy. Second, we consider the tasks of predicting the similarity and substitutability of pairs of discourse connectives. To assist in this, we introduce a novel information theoretic function based on variance that, in combination with distributional similarity, is useful for learning such relationships. Third, we attempt to automatically construct taxonomies of discourse connectives capturing substitutability relationships. We introduce a probability model of taxonomies, and show that this can improve accuracy on learning substitutability relationships. Finally, we develop an algorithm for automatically constructing or extending such taxonomies which uses beam search to help find the optimal taxonomy.

Discourse connectives are metatextual comments that signal discourse coherence relations. They can be realized by sentence adverbials that have their roots in verb phrase adverbials and have followed a path of development that is well attested both for English and cross-linguistically. This study investigates how and why it occurs. It claims that the development belongs to a wider phenomenon of unidirectional internal semantic change, that this change involves context-induced reinterpretation, and that both the immediate discourse context and the wider rhetorical context can be instrumental in bringing it about. Using diachronic and synchronic data in a corpus-linguistic approach, the frequency and distribution of the adverbials after all, in fact, at least and of course are investigated. These are found to follow similar paths of development at different rates and to varying extents. Each undergoes some increase in frequency, subjectification and abstraction, shift of discourse plane and categorial reanalysis. Each acquires at least one connective function to express rhetorical relations such as concession, contrast, justification or elaboration. These relations are defined using the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. The analysis identifies, in the history of the expressions, contexts of co-occurrence with particular relations that are argued to generate connective implicatures which later crystallize. During long periods the expressions may have stable but defeasible implicatures in the relevant contexts. These contexts include rhetorical structures spanning two or more clause complexes and often consisting of quasi-conventional sequences of rhetorical relations typical of argumentation. They may be described as incipient discourse constructions or rhetorical idioms. The emergence of new discourse connectives is seen to share many of the features attested in the grammaticalization of lexical material. It is argued that these phenomena are best accounted for in a single, usage-based theory of internal semantic change.

Thesis (M.S.)--Georgia Southern University, 2005.
"A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Science" ETD. Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-57)

This thesis is concerned with a range of Japanese expressions which have been classified in traditional Japanese studies as marking causal relations between segments of discourse: dakara, sorede, tsumari, sunawachi, yahari and kekkyoku. I argue that this traditional approach, which has an affinity with coherence based analyses of (mostly) English discourse connectives, is not adequate either at a descriptive or an explanatory level. On the one hand, it predicts that expressions which fall into the same class are intersubstitutable in all contexts, which they are not. On the other hand, it cannot sxplain why expressions within a category are at once so similar and yet so different.

This study investigates the acquisition of Chinese connectives by second language learners under the theoretical framework of usage-based theory. Language is not a random set of words and phrases, but rather a coherent and cohesive set of utterances. As such, learning a second language (L2) entails, among other processes, learners’ development of employing cohesive devices to construct a coherent discourse in their target language. One type of cohesive devices frequently used by L2 learners is connectives. In Chinese, connectives are utilized to denote various semantic relationships between the clauses in a compound sentence. Due to their flexibility and complexity in nature, Chinese connectives present a huge challenge to L2 learners’ learning. However, to date no study has been set up to explore the learners’ development of Chinese connectives within L2 Chinese research community. This study aims to fill this gap in the literature and build an L2 acquisitional model of Chinese connectives under the theoretical framework of Constructionist Usage-based Theory. Constructionist Usage-based Theory maintains that the basic unit of language is constructions and that the syntactic and lexical form of constructions and its corresponding semantic and discourse functions are conventionalized in language usage. According to these notions, language learning is believed to be driven by the factors grounded in the form and function of constructions in language usage. This study specifically examines how the factors of frequency, form, function, contingency (interaction of form and function), and L1-tuned attention affect L2 Chinese learners’ development of Chinese connectives. Furthermore, the study investigates the learners’ knowledge about the distribution of Chinese connectives across different proficiency levels. Specifically, this study aims to address four research questions: (1) what is the relationship between L2 learners’ proficiency level and language background and the acquisition of Chinese connectives?; (2) do L2 learners overuse or underuse Chinese connectives in constructing responses when the other in a pair is given and what errors do L2 learners make when using Chinese connectives?; (3) how can 12 target pairs of Chinese connectives be categorized into (hierarchical) groups based on L2 Chinese learners’ performance?; and (4) how do theoretically-motivated models represent the factorial structure underlying L2 acquisition of Chinese connectives? To address the four research questions, this study elicited L2 Chinese learners’ performance in two tests: a mini-discourse completion test and a form-function association test. In the mini-discourse completion test, learners were required to supply a missing clause to complete a three-clause discourse in which one of paired connectives was embedded; in the form-function association test, learners were asked to choose options of paired connectives to link two given clauses where connectives were omitted. Results showed that the development of all Chinese paired connectives was positively correlated to L2 learners’ L2 proficiency level. Learners with heritage language background seemed to have an advantage over less frequent and less prototypical connectives. Predominantly, L2 learners underused Chinese connectives, resulting from the cross-linguistic influence of disparity between English and Chinese connectives at the structural level in particular and between English and Chinese textual cohesion at the discourse level in general. Based on L2 learners’ performances in the two tests, the 12 pairs of Chinese connectives were classifier into four hierarchical groups. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the usage-based factors (i.e., frequency, co-occurrence strength, formulaicity, prototypicality, contingency, and L1-tuned attention) jointly determined the L2 acquisition and development of Chinese connectives in a complex, adaptive, dynamic manner. Summarizing these findings, this study proposed a usage-based acquisitional model of L2 Chinese connectives, providing theoretical contributions to the usage-based theory and pedagogical implications for Chinese connectives.

Two fundamental components of causality are the Cause and the Result. In linguistic work the distinction between these aspects is commonly blurred, presumably because the primary research focus has been on describing how language encodes causality. The semantic nature of the component events and the constraints on their relationship are seldom discussed; however, the current work aims to shed light on a broader spectrum of features that underlie the concept. This is an essential foundation for understanding how language communicates Result. The present discussion explores and illuminates the nature of this concept focusing on a relatively open-ended set of linguistic elements that can play a role in shaping a discourse relation in addition to discourse connectives. This is in contrast to the majority of the previous research, which has been quite intensely concerned with investigating a limited collection of well-established causality markers. Also, despite the fact that English has been used in studies on causality both as a control language and a metalanguage, there is surprisingly little work on the semantics of the relations that occur specifically in English, let alone Result relations. By borrowing from several cognitively-oriented approaches and combining empirical data from two written corpora (British National Corpus and the Penn Discourse Treebank) with experimental work, the current study systematically investigates the conceptual and linguistic properties of several closely related Result relation types (including Purpose), along with the joint role of discourse connectives and other discourse elements in conveying the intended sense. The findings indicate that linguistic signals of the conceptual structure of the relation seem to play a more significant role in the interpretation than explicit marking. Two factors emerged as more vital cues than the presence of the ambiguous connective so.  In Purpose relations, a modal auxiliary conveying an intended effect, and in Result relations the presence/absence of an intentionally acting actor are crucial for disambiguation. The multifunctional connective therefore seems to merely satisfy the mandatory marking requirement related to the intrinsically unrealized (‘nonveridical’) nature of Purpose. In Result the presence of an ambiguous marker is to a great extent optional in English. However, discourse markers can also reflect how language users categorize causal event types. This claim has been confirmed in several cross-linguistic analyses, but the lexicon of English connectives has not been systematically investigated from this vantage point. The few existing studies found that the uses of English connectives are quite unconstrained across causal categories. The present work contributes to this line of research and suggests that two unambiguous markers, as a result and for this reason, indeed cover a wide range of causal event types; however, they also exhibit significant tendencies to occur prototypically in certain relation types. The presence and role of an intentionally acting discourse participant behind both real-world and linguistic causally-related events contributes to these tendencies. The contexts that include such a participant are regarded as intrinsically subjective and have been found to manifest surface expressions of subjectivity in previous work on other languages. The current study confirms similar tendencies in the linguistic construal and marking of Result relations in English, which proves that certain language elements partake in establishing the intended interpretation on a par with discourse connectives.  What emerges as a result of this discussion, is therefore an account on how English utilizes the broad category of Result and what linguistic elements are used to convey the array of resultative events.

The present study investigates how Discourse Connectives are handled in translation. It starts by reviewing available published studies on DCs with a particular focus on how these impacted on the field of translation studies and translation practice. DCs in English are mainly looked at from two different angles as the study shows: coherence/cohesion theory or from a relevance theory perspective. In Arabic, they are mainly grammatical structures. The study provides arguments which explain why looking at these linguistic structures from a relevance theory standpoint provide a better basis for understanding their role and the discourse in which they occur. The aim of the present research is to investigate how Discourse Connectives (DCs)- the structures used to provide the reader/hearer with clues as to what direction the writer/speaker wants them to focus on- are handled in translation. The research attempts to shed light on choices translators make when encountering DCs, and endeavours to put these choices to scrutiny by drawing on relevance theory. Thus, the main hypothesis adopted is that each instance a DCs is utilised, it is assumed that it bears a degree of relevance to the reader/hearer or in other words assist them to a less costly process - in terms of time and mental processing effort - in reaching the intended communication. To provide evidence for this view an empirical investigation was carried out. The corpus studied was published by the American geo- political studies think-tank (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) were selected together with their professionally translated and published versions. An investigation of DCs and their translation was carried out on carefully selected corpora. The basis of this discussion is the application of the Principle of Relevance as suggested by proponents of Relevance Theory in reaching the intended meaning in the source text through contextual effects (knowledge of the world, to use relevance theory proponents terms) and the notion of 'clues7, provided by discourse connectives, which facilitate a successful rendering.

Discourse connectives signal discourse coherence by making discourse relations explicit and by playing a role in the organization and structure of information in discourse. Therefore, their use in L2 writing is an important field of study that is likely to have implications for discourse competence both at the sentence-level discourse and at the level of larger discourse structure. The aim of the present study is to account for the use of three contrastive discourse connectives, but, however and although at both the microstructural and the macrostructural levels of discourse in the argumentative essays written by Turkish learners of English and native speakers of American English. The patterns of use by L2 learners are compared with those of native speakers. The analysis is based on 120 essays from two corpora: Turkish subcorpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (TICLE) and American subcorpus of Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (ALOCNESS). The study reveals that the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English and American students do not differ significantly regarding the three connectives neither structurally nor semantically. However, at the macrostructural level of discourse, differences concerning the pattern of argumentation and the role that the connectives play in the claim-counterargument-refutation pattern of organization were observed. Further analysis on other lexical items used in argumentation shows that in ALOCNESS, there is more reliance on other means, such as the lexical items expressing modality and those signaling the argumentative nature of the text.

Le présent travail part d'un concept heuristique, le « travail de l'altérité », pour élucider un faisceau de propriétés syntaxiques et fonctionnelles des mots du discours en allemand. Nous posons l'idée d'une coexistence entre points de vue différents à l'intérieur d'un même énoncé, et distinguons trois types de prise en compte de cette altérité constitutive. Un énoncé peut être pris comme une expression partielle et partiale de ce qu'il y aurait à dire, et coexister avec d'autres points de vue sur un mode cumulatif. C'est le domaine d'intervention d'une classe d'adverbiaux que nous qualifions de perspectivaux et que l'on peut identifier par un ensemble de propriétés distributionnelles précises. L'énoncé peut être construit par contrepied vis-à-vis d'autres énoncés possibles, correspondant à des solutions préconstruites (phénomènes de focalisation). On distingue alors les adverbiaux paradigmatisants, classe fonctionnelle associée à des propriétés sémantico-syntaxiques précises, de l'ensemble plus vaste des adverbiaux sensibles au focus, mais aussi des adverbes spécialisés dans l'expression du parcours sur une classe d'arguments. Ceux-ci accèdent à la fonction d'adverbial paradigmatisant, mais peuvent apparaître dans d'autres fonctions. Enfin, la gestion de la pluralité des points de vue peut correspondre à la coexistence d'avis divergents sur la validité du contenu. Ce mode d'altérité est géré en allemand par les particules modales, classe strictement fonctionnelle dont l'analyse débouche sur une reconsidération des types d'énoncés, conçus comme des configurations d'indices locutoires, dans une perspective austinienne
This study deals with three groups of discourse markers in German: (i) disjuncts and attitudinal adverbials (henceforth "perspectival adverbials"), (ii) focus particles ("paradigm-scanning adverbials") and (iii) modal particles. The starting point of the analysis is the heuristic notion of "Otherness at work", i.e. the constitutive role of coexisting heterogeneous viewpoints: the three groups of discourse markers, each of which has the status of a functional class with recurring distributional properties, correspond to three modes of Otherness. First, an utterance can be seen as expressing a biased and selective perspective on "What there is". It thus coexists with other, possible yet dispreferred perspectives. Modal adverbials, argumentative disjuncts and metalinguistic markers are various subtypes of these perspectival adverbials. Further, the utterance (or a constituent thereof) can be located into a set of conflicting alternatives thanks to various focussing strategies. It is necessary to distinguish between focus-sensitive adverbials as a whole, the functional class of paradigm-scanning adverbials, and the lexical set of contrastive adverbs that can access the aforementioned function. The traditional class of "focus particle" is thus deconstructed along three different, non-parallel levels. Finally, constitutive otherness can stand for conflicting or mixed views about the validity of the propositional content. This kind of Otherness, which can (but needs not) correspond to modal intersubjectivisation, is the semantic domain of modal particles, which are analyzed here in their interaction with sentence mood

Orientador: Sandra Denise Gasparini Bastos
Resumo: Este trabalho objetiva apresentar uma trajetória de gramaticalização para os juntores concessivos "aunque", "a pesar de (que)" e "por mucho (que)", adotando como aparato teórico os estudos em gramaticalização (TRAUGOTT, 1997; BYBEE, 2003, 2006; HOPPER; TRAUGOTT, 2003, entre outros) e o modelo da Gramática Discursivo-Funcional (GDF), de Hengeveld e Mackenzie (2008). Na análise sincrônica realizada por Parra (2016) sob a perspectiva da GDF, a autora observa que o juntor "aunque" pode marcar uma relação concessiva em três camadas distintas no espanhol peninsular atual: na do Conteúdo Proposicional, pertencente ao Nível Representacional, e nas camadas do Ato Discursivo e do Movimento, localizadas no Nível Interpessoal. A partir desse resultado, levantamos a hipótese de que, quando analisados diacronicamente, os usos de "aunque" podem revelar uma trajetória de gramaticalização que parte de um uso semântico para usos pragmáticos, e de que tal trajetória pode corresponder a um processo comum sofrido pelos juntores concessivos dessa língua. Assim, selecionamos para este estudo, além do juntor "aunque", os juntores "a pesar de (que)" e "por mucho (que)", por serem, dentre os juntores apontados por Flamenco García (1999), os que se mostraram mais frequentes nos dados e por advirem de origens distintas, tendo em vista as fontes para o desenvolvimento de juntores concessivos apontadas por König (1994). O universo de investigação desta pesquisa reúne ocorrências dos três juntores na fase ... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo)
Abstract: This paper aims to present a path of grammaticalization for the concessive connectives "aunque", "a pesar de (que)" and "por mucho (que)" adopting as a theoretical apparatus the studies on grammaticalization (TRAUGOTT, 1997; BYBEE, 2003, 2006; HOPPER; TRAUGOTT, 2003, among others) and the model of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), by Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008). In the synchronic analysis performed by Parra (2016) from the perspective of the FDG, the author notes that the connective "aunque" can mark a concessive relationship in three distinct layers in the current Peninsular Spanish: that of Propositional Content, belonging to the Representational Level, and the layers of the Move and Discourse Act, located at the Interpersonal Level. From this result, we hypothesize that, when analyzed diachronically, the uses of "aunque" may reveal a grammaticalization trajectory that starts from a semantic use for pragmatic uses, and that such trajectory may correspond to a common process suffered by the concessive connectives of that language. Thus, we selected for this study, in addition to the connective "aunque", the connectives "a pesar de (que)" and "por mucho (que)", since they are among the connectives pointed out by Flamenco García (1999), those who had the highest number of occurrences in a previous research, and because they come from different origins, considering the sources for the development of concessive joints pointed out by König (1994). The universe of this resear... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)
Doutor

In this thesis, we aim to analyze the computational aspects of discourse annotation. Discourse is not only a concatenation of sentences
in fact the totality of discourse is more than the sum total of the sentences that constitute it. The property that differentiates discourse from a set of arbitrary sentences is defined as coherence. Coherence is established by the relations between the parts of discourse. We have a lexicalized approach to discourse, therefore in this study, discourse relations are considered to be set up by lexical items called discourse connectives. Systematic analysis of coherence requires an annotated corpus in which coherence relations are encoded. We developed an annotation environment to be used in an ongoing discourse level annotation project which aims to generate a theory-neutral source of coherence relations. We followed a data-driven methodology in design of the data structure employed in the annotation software. For this reason, we examined the predicate-argument structure of connectives. This analysis shows that stand-off annotation technique is more suitable than an inline method for such an annotation environment. This thesis also include a brief discussion on the formal implications of coherence relation constructions.

Connective ties in discourse: Three ERP studies on causal, temporal and concessive connective ties and their influence on language processing.

Questions

In four experiments the influence of lexical connectives such as " darum", therefore, " danach", afterwards, and " trotzdem", nevertheless, on the processing of short two-sentence discourses was examined and compared to the processing of deictical sentential adverbs such as " gestern", yesterday, and " lieber", rather. These latter words do not have the property of signaling a certain discourse relation between two sentences, as connective ties do. Three questions were central to the work:

* Do the processing contrasts found between connective and non-connective elements extend to connective ties and deictical sentential adverbs (experiments 2 and 3)?

* Does the semantic content of the connective ties play the primary role, i.e is the major distinction to be made indeed between connective and non-connective or instead between causal, temporal and concessive?

* When precisely is the information provided by connective ties used? There is some evidence that connective ties can have an immediate influence on the integration of subsequent elements, but the end of the second sentences appears to play an important role as well: experiments 2, 3, and 4.

Conclusions

First of all, the theoretical distinction between connective and non-connective elements does indeed have " cognitive reality" . This has already been shown in previous studies. The present studies do however show, that there is also a difference between one-place discourse elements (deictical sentential adverbs) and two-place discourse elements, namely connective ties, since all experiments examining this contrast found evidence for qualitatively and quantitatively different processing (experiments 1, 2, and 3).

Secondly, the semantic type of the connective ties also plays a role. This was not shown for the LAN, found for all connective ties when compared to non-connective elements, and consequently interpreted as a more abstract reflection of the integration of connective ties. There was also no difference between causal and temporal connective ties before the end of the discourses in experiment 3.

However, the N400 found for incoherent discourses in experiment 2, larger for connective incoherent than non-connective incoherent discourses, as well as the P3b found for concessive connective ties in the comparison between causal and concessive connective ties gave reason to assume that the semantic content of connective ties is made use of in incremental processing, and that the relation signaled by the connective tie is the one that readers attempt to construct.

Concerning when the information provided by connective ties is used, it appears as if connectivity is generally and obligatorily taken at face value. As long as the meaning of a connective tie did not conflict with a preferred canonical discourse relation, there were no differences found for varying connective discourses (experiment 3). However, the fact that concessive connective ties announce the need for a more complex text representation was recognized and made use of immediately (experiment 4). Additionally, a violation of the discourse relation resulted in more difficult semantic integration if a connective tie was present (experiment 2). It is therefore concluded here that connective ties influence processing immediately.

This claim has to be modified somewhat, since the sentence-final elements suggested that connective ties trigger different integration processes than non-connective elements. It seems as if the answer to the question of when connective ties are processed is neither exclusively immediately nor exclusively afterwards, but that both viewpoints are correct. It is suggested here that before the end of a discourse economy plays a central role in that a canonical relation is assumed unless there is evidence to the contrary. A connective tie could have the function of reducing the dimensions evaluated in a discourse to the one signaled by the connective tie. At the end of the discourse the representation is evaluated and verified, and an integrated situation model constructed. Here, the complexity of the different discourse relations that connective ties can signal, is expressed.
Konnektiva im Diskurs: Drei EKP-Studien zu kausalen, temporalen und konzessiven Konnektoren und ihrem Einfluss auf die Sprachverarbeitung.

Einführung und Fragestellung

In vier Experimenten wurde der Einfluss von lexikalischen Konnektiva wie " darum", " danach" und " trotzdem" auf die Verarbeitung von kurzen zweisätzigen Diskursen untersucht und mit der Verarbeitung von deiktischen Satzaderbien wie " gestern" und " lieber" verglichen, die nicht wie die Konnektiva die Eigenschaft haben, die Diskursrelation zwischen zwei Sätzen explizit auszudrücken.

Drei Fragen standen im Mittelpunkt der Arbeit:

* Findet sich der Kontrast zwischen konnektiven und nicht-konnektiven Elementen auch zwischen Konnektiva und deiktischen Satzadverbien wieder (Experimente 2 und 3)?

* Spielt der semantische Inhalt der Konnektiva die primäre Rolle: ist die Hauptunterscheidung zwischen konnektiven und nicht-konnektiven Elementen zu machen, oder zwischen kausalen (darum, deshalb), temporalen (danach, hinterher) und konzessiven (trotzdem, dennoch) Elementen (Experimente 3 / 4)?

* Wann genau wird die Information, die Konnektiva bieten, genutzt? Es gibt Evidenz dafür, dass Konnektiva einen sofortigen Einfluss haben, aber auch dafür, dass das Ende der Texte eine gewichtige Rolle spielt: Experimente 2, 3, und 4.

Konklusionen

Zunächst einmal hat die theoretische Unterscheidung zwischen konnektiven und nicht-konnektiven Worten tatsächlich " kognitive Realität" . Dies wurde bereits in früheren Studien gezeigt. Die aktuellen Experimente zeigten jedoch, dass es auch einen Unterschied zwischen einstelligen (deiktische Satzadverbien) und zweistelligen (Konnektiva) Diskursrelationen gibt, da alle Experimente, die diesen Kontrast untersuchten, qualitativ und quantitativ andere Verarbeitung für Konnektiva zeigten (Experimente 1, 2 und 3).

Zweitens spielt der semantische Typus der Konnektiva ebenfalls eine Rolle. Dieser Einfluss zeigte sich nicht für die LAN, die für alle Konnektiva im Vergleich mit nicht-konnektiven Elementen gefunden wurde, und die dementsprechend auch als Korrelat abstrakterer Integration von Konnektiva vorgeschlagen wird. Es zeigte sich ebenfalls kein Unterschied zwischen kausalen und temporalen Konnektiva vor dem Ende des Diskurses in Experiment 3. Die N400, gefunden für inkohärente Satzpaare in Experiment 2, größer für inkohärent konnektive als inkohärent nicht-konnektive Diskurse, wie auch die P3b, gefunden im Vergleich zwischen kausalen und konzessiven Konnektiva in Experiment 4, lieferten jedoch Grund zu der Annahme, dass die Bedeutung von Konnektiva in der inkrementellen Verarbeitung genutzt wird, und dass die Relation, die Konnektiva signalisieren, diejenige ist, die Leser versuchen zu erstellen.

Im Hinblick auf wann die Information, die Konnektiva liefern, genutzt wird, scheint es, also ob Konnektivität generell und obligatorisch für bare Münze genommen wird. So lange die Bedeutung der Konnektiva nicht mit einer präferierten kanonischen Diskursrelation konfligierte, zeigten sich keine Differenzen innerhalb verschiedener konnektiver Diskurse (Experiment 3), aber die Tatsache, dass konzessive Konnektiva die Notwendigkeit einer komplexeren Textrepräsentation voraussagen, wurde sofort erkannt und genutzt (Experiment 4). Zusätzlich resultierte eine Verletzung der Diskursrelation in Experiment 2 in erschwerterer semantischer Integration, wenn ein Konnektivum vorhanden war. Es wird daher gefolgert, dass Konnektiva die Verarbeitung sofort beeinflussen.

Diese Schlussfolgerung muss jedoch etwas abgeschwächt werden, da die satzfinalen Elemente darauf hinwiesen, dass Konnektiva andere Integrationsprozesse am Ende der Diskurse auslösten als nicht-konnektive Elemente. Es scheint, dass die Antwort auf die Frage, wann Konnektiva verarbeitet werden, weder sofort noch hinterher ist, sondern dass beide Sichtweisen korrekt sind. Es wird hier vorgeschlagen, dass vor dem Ende eines Diskurses Ökonomie insofern eine entscheidende Rolle spielt, als eine kanonische Relation angenommen wird so lange es keine gegenteilige Evidenz gibt. Ein Konnektivum könnte die evaluierten Dimensionen in einem Diskurs auf die signalisierten reduzieren. Am Ende des Diskurses wird die erstellte Textrepräsentation evaluiert und verifiziert, und ein integriertes Situationsmodell erstellt. Hier drückt sich dann die Komplexität der verschiedenen Diskursrelationen, die Konnktiva signalisieren können, aus.

Cette thèse étudie l'adverbe autrement, au travers de ses trois emplois principaux : adverbe de manière, connecteur d'hypothèse négative, et rupteur de topique. L'accent est mis sur son fonctionnement anaphorique et son rôle dans la structure du discours. Après avoir passé en revue les théories du discours et la littérature sur l'adverbe, on dégage les propriétés des trois emplois grâce à des énoncés tirés de corpus oraux et écrits, en montrant comment le contexte sert à la récupération de l'antécédent et comment l'adverbe s'appuie sur le discours et le construit en même temps. Dès l'adverbe de manière, anaphore et portée droite sont essentielles à la construction du sens. Avec le connecteur, les relations référentielles laissent place aux relations logiques de proposition à proposition, tandis que le rupteur de topique est un emploi métalinguistique portant sur des constituants abstraits du discours. Un noyau de sens [l'anaphore et la négation] est dégagé, commun aux trois emplois et permettant d'envisager des points de passage entre eux. Cette étude synchronique est ensuite mise à profit pour reconstruire la grammaticalisation de l'adverbe, le détail des observations présentes contrebalançant la rareté des données historiques. On montre que c'est à travers la notion de construction, c'est-à-dire l'emploi de l'adverbe dans certains contextes, que l'évolution a pu avoir lieu : en particulier, l'ordre des mots en ancien français a été crucial, permettant à l'adverbe de manière d'occuper la position initiale propice à la réanalyse ; l'emploi de conjonctions a aussi favorisé l'émergence de certaines valeurs de l'adverbe.

The thesis revisits film and film-culture history in Sweden, Denmark and Norway with a view to discourses and practices of the inter- and trans-Scandinavian in the silent era. Excluding the earliest films, but including the transition to synchronised sound, it covers the period of the 1900s to 1930 with emphasis on the 1910s and 1920s. The thesis identifies notions about the relations between the Scandinavian and the national by means of a number of case studies based on textual historical sources. As a consistent Scandinavian perspective on this period is new, the investigation substantially supplements and revises the individual national film histories of these countries. It adds missing context to national developments and makes visible border phenomena such as transnational collaborations and co-producing practices. The thesis finds that film production in Scandinavia in the silent era was orientated towards one of two poles, at times combined or in a state of negotiation: international economic ambitions or national cultural aspirations. The latter was frequently conceptualised as northern, Nordic and Scandinavian. ‘Scandinaviannesses’ performed when drawing on nature, folklore, literature and heritage, not least that of Norway, were employed for use in and out of Scandinavia by means of strategies of ‘double-entry book-keeping’.  During the period, the notion of location underwent changes from an illusory, theatrical device to an inherently meaningful entity carrying identities infused with the Scandinavian. Examining the effects of shared comprehension of language and a shared recent history of Scandinavist ideas, the thesis identifies instrumental notions of kindredness and senses of cultural proprietorship extending to the output of the neighbouring countries. These notions were mobilised selectively within film culture and motivated practical transnational collaboration from the side of the authorities as well as in trade organisations.

The association between receptive language skills and reading comprehension has been established in the research literature. Even when the importance of receptive skills for reading comprehension has been strongly supported, in practice lower levels of skills tend to go unnoticed in typically developing children. A potentially more visible modality of language, expressive skills using speech samples, has been rarely examined despite the longitudinal links between speech and later reading development, and the connections between language and reading impairments. Even fewer reading studies have examined expressive skills using a subgroup of speech samples – narrative samples – which are closer to the kind of language practitioners can observe in their classrooms, and are also a rich source of linguistic and discourse-level data in school-aged children. This thesis presents a study examining the relationship between expressive language skills in narrative samples and reading comprehension after the first two years of formal reading instruction, with considerable attention given to methodological and developmental issues. In order to address the main methodological issues surrounding the identification of the optimal linguistic indices in terms of reliability and the existence of developmental patterns, two studies of language development in oral narratives were carried out. The first of the narrative language studies drew data from an existing corpus, while the other analysed primary data, collected specifically for this purpose. Having identified the optimal narrative indices in two different samples, the main study examined the relationships between these expressive narrative measures along with receptive standardised measures, and reading comprehension in a monolingual sample of eighty 7- and 8-year-old children attending Year 3 in the UK. Both receptive and expressive oral language skills were assessed at three different levels: vocabulary, grammar and discourse. Regression analyses indicated that, when considering expressive narrative variables on their own, expressive grammar and vocabulary, in that order, contributed to explain over a fifth of reading comprehension variance in typically developing children. When controlling for receptive language however, expressive skills were not able to account for significant unique variance in the outcome measure. Nonetheless, mediation analyses revealed that receptive vocabulary and grammar played a mediating role in the relationship between expressive skills from narratives and reading comprehension. Results and further research directions are discussed in the context of this study’s methodological considerations.

As social media has emerged to become a key site for contemporary communications and cultural production, the internet meme has penetrated every level of social networking online. Albeit being a global phenomenon with pervasive discursive power in a number of fields ranging from humour to international politics and cyber warfare, comparatively little research has been made into how internet memes work on the discursive level of identity formation and their influence on the formation of internet-based social movements. Using Reddit stock market anarchists r/WallStreetBets as case study, this thesis will use Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze how internet memes work on the level of socio-political formations and how their function can be understood in relation to entropic social environments online. This thesis investigates how internet memes are used as a tool for creation of motifs for action, identity markers, connective action, and social narrativization within an ambivalent social movement online. Introducing the novel term ”memetic discourse” as a way to understand memes as transferable units of memetically programmed content, this study shows the potential of memes to act as effective yet unstable modes of communication within networked environments.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
資訊工程學研究所
103
Discourse relations represent how textual units logically connect with each other. Analyzing the discourse structure for texts could aid the understanding of the meaning behind paragraphs. There are many potential applications such as natural language interface and large-scale content-analysis. Although there are popular English discourse corpora for researchers, large-scale Chinese discourse corpora have not been available until recently. In addition, Chinese discourse analysis has many unique issues including the variety of discourse connectives, the common occurrences of parallel connectives, and the complex sentence structures. Discourse connectives are important clues for identifying discourse relations in Chinese texts. However, the ambiguity involved makes it a challenge to extract true connectives. In this thesis, we investigate four tasks regarding explicit discourse relations that are signaled by discourse connectives. Firstly, we deal with the extraction of explicit discourse connectives. Secondly, we investigate resolving linking ambiguities among connective components. Thirdly, we disambiguate the discourse relation type for each connective. Finally, we extract the arguments for each discourse connective. Several features are proposed to train Logistic Regression classifiers to disambiguate between discourse and non-discourse usages and the relation types for connectives. Additionally, we rank each connective candidate and develop a greedy algorithm to resolve linking ambiguities. Finally, the argument identification is formulated as a sequence labeling problem, and Conditional Random Fields are utilized to determine the argument boundaries. Besides explicit discourse relations, further investigation must be done to recognize implicit relations. Built upon these components, an end-to-end discourse parser for Chinese may be constructed in future studies.

Magdaléna Rysová Discourse Connectives in Czech (From Centre to Periphery) Abstract The thesis focuses on description and analysis of discourse connectives in Czech in broader sense, i.e. by which language means it is possible to express sense relation within a text. The thesis is not limited to any parts of speech (like conjunctions or structuring particles) but it tries to find and describe all language means in Czech with the ability to connect two pieces or units of a text into one coherent complex. The thesis investigates discourse connectives in Czech with respect to the so called secondary connectives (i.e. mainly multiword phrases like to je důvod, proč - that is the reason why; kvůli těmto skutečnostem - due to these facts etc., in opposition to primary connectives like však - however, nebo - or, a - and, ale - but, proto - therefore etc.). Discourse connectives are (in general terms) understood as language expressions that signal semantico-pragmatic relations within a text. However, there are many theories that significantly differ in the concrete description of these expressions. Therefore, there is not a generally accepted and universal definition of discourse connectives and their description and characteristics is still a matter of linguistic discussion. The aim of this thesis is to contribute...

The paper concentrates on which language means may be included into the annotation of discourse relations in the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) and tries to examine the so called alternative lexicalizations of discourse markers (AltLex's) in Czech. The analysis proceeds from the annotated data of PDT and tries to draw a comparison between the Czech AltLex's from PDT and English AltLex's from PDTB (the Penn Discourse Treebank). The paper presents the lexico-syntactic and semantic characterization of the Czech AltLex's and comments on the current stage of their annotation in PDT. In the current version, PDT contains 306 expressions (out of the total 43,955 of sentences) that were labeled by annotators as being an AltLex. However, as the analysis demonstrates, this number is not final. We suppose that it will increase after the further elaboration, as AltLex's are not restricted to a limited set of syntactic classes and some of them exhibit a great degree of variation.

This doctoral thesis is devoted to linguistic analysis of discourse relations as one of the aspects of discourse coherence. Discourse relations are semantic relations holding between propositions in a discourse (discourse arguments). The aim of the thesis is a complex description of discourse relations in Czech and its application in an annotation scheme in the Prague Dependency Treebank. The thesis is divided into three parts: The first one is focused on the theoretical description of discourse relations and on analysis of adequacy of various methodological concepts in corpus processing. The second part describes in detail the proposed scheme for the annotation of discourse relations and the process of the corpus build- up including the evaluation of consistency of the annotated data. Finally, in the last part of the thesis, we address some problematic issues arisen with the employment the proposed scheme and look for their possible solutions.

This thesis deals with discourse relations as a parameter of style. Two sets of text samples were analysed, both of which are characterized by the same stylistics features within the cathegory of scholarly style but differ in the date of origin (1500-1620 for one set, 1950- for the other). Analysis is focused on the issue to which extent are semantic relations in the discourse structure marked up by explicit lexical means, i. e. by the discourse connectives. The sets of text samples were annotated according to the scheme used for the discourse annotation in The Prague Dependency Treebank. The hypothesis was confirmed that discourse relations are marked up by the discourse connectives more frequently in the set of texts from the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century than in the other set. It turns out in further investigation that the difference mentioned above was caused by different conventions in placing discourse connectives rather than by establishing different semantic relations between textual units. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Over the span of the last 16 years of my teaching career I have taught elementary, secondary and adult learners in both traditional classroom environments, alternative school settings and distributed learning platforms. Regardless of the grade, subject or environment I have been an advocate of digital technology in education, and enthusiastically welcomed George Siemens’ predicted paradigm shift to connectedness enabled through its uses (as cited in Wikipedia, 2013). However, over the past decade this ability to connect through technology has also lead to an increase in cyber-bullying coupled with inherent risks associated with online environments making the connection between cyber-bullying and social media an important area of study. This study began because of a legal case study I was presented with during a graduate course at the University of Victoria concerning issues related to teachers and the law. The case study is based on a high profile YouTube cyber-bullying incident in Canada. Using concepts such as neoliberalism and the promotion of technology as a 21st century tool for schooling, I reviewed Government of Canada and British Columbian research as well as international research regarding the advantages and disadvantages of the use of technology by humans and in education. These documents provided an overview of debates around the benefits for using the Internet, and contrasted this with risks connected to loss of privacy and possible bullying online (cyber-bullying). My methodology for the study is grounded in qualitative research in which I used three different focus groups from which to gather data. The first group included graduate students from the University of Victoria enrolled in Leadership Studies. The second group consisted of members from a Social Justice Committee. The final group represented a team of teachers, administrators and support staff at a Secondary School on a coastal School District in British Columbia. Each focus group observed a video posted on YouTube and the discourse that was left below the posting of the video. Participants were asked to reflect individually, discuss as a group and record their thoughts and feelings for the purposes of the study and as a means to suggest ways to mitigate change. Their comments and suggestions for ways to mitigate change supported research I found and at times pointed towards directions I had yet to consider. Similar to me, the act of viewing and participating in the case study left an impact as to how best to mitigate change through the use of case studies and discussions that helped develop compassion and awareness for cyber-bullying victims. The study concludes with a review of current technology and health and career curriculum as it pertains to issues involving cyber-bullying and promoting socially responsible behaviour on the Internet available to schools in British Columbia, along with information regarding new initiatives including the E.R.A.S.E. bullying website.
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