Clause Complex Research Articles

Clause complex relations in aphasic discourse: A longitudinal case study

This study documents the ways in which an aphasic speaker FP joins clauses together to form texts, using Halliday's systemic—functional grammar as the framework for analysis. In particular, it analyses the patterns of clause complex relations demonstrated—both from structural and logico-semantic perspectives. These constitute the logical metafunction, one of the three main aspects of language function postulated by Halliday as being integral to the language system. FP's patterns of clause complex relations over a six-month period following his stroke are documented and compared with data obtained from a matched normal speaker ED as well as other data currently available on normal performance. Results show similarities between FP and normal speakers in terms of range of options available to both. However, differences are reported in the frequency with which these options are chosen. The results are discussed in terms of the retained abilities of the aphasic speaker and the ways in which these abilities are used to create meanings in discourse.

Theme in English telephone conversation

In goal-oriented telephone conversation speakers presumably try to word their messages so as to ensure an interpretation according to their intentions. Significant in this connection is how messages are introduced. The present study examines the choice of introductory element, in English telephone conversation. Three types of theme are accounted for: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The ideational theme refers to extralinguistic phenomena, the interpersonal theme reflects the speaker's attitude or intention with regard to the message, and the textual theme relates the message to previous talk. The ideational theme is defined as the first structural element in an independent conjoinable clause complex, a so-called T-unit. In the eight sample texts, comprising some 4500 words of conversation, 419 T-units have been identified. A T-unit may have more than one theme. The ideational theme may be preceded by a textual and/or an interpersonal theme. Such clusters occur in 56% of the T-units in the sample texts. Clusters of theme, as well as examples of marked ideational themes and thematic repair are discussed. The last question to be raised concerns the function of theme. It is proposed that textual and interpersonal themes may be subcategorized according to function. It is further suggested that the function of theme may be viewed in an interactive perspective. A common function of all types of theme in the sample texts seems to be to orient the listener about upcoming talk.

Automated syntactic text description enhancement: The thematic structure of discourse utterances

Our work aims at the optimization of existing tools for computer-assisted description and analysis of textual data. More specifically, we have been involved in the thematic description of clauses and clause complexes of Quebec budget speeches from 1934 to 1960. Our main objective is to enhance the work already done in this direction by elaborating the analytic framework through a study of the thematic structure of these discourses. We first set out the general context of our work by briefly explaining the research project on political discourse under the Duplessis Regime in Quebec (1936–60) and giving a brief survey of the parsing strategy applied to the corpus. Second, we present the theoretical background of thematic analysis and the operational model that we are using here. Finally, we try to illustrate the relevance of such methodological work on research data. Louis-Claude Paquin is a research officer at the Centre for Computer-assisted Textual Analysis (Centre dATO). His work consist of software and methodological development for content analysis and expert systems. Jacques Beauchemin is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology at The Universite du Quebec a Montreal. His thesis is a comparative study of different forms of political discourse under the Duplessis Regime in Quebec.

Signed English in the classroom, II. Structural and pragmatic aspects of teachers' speech and sign

In the first paper in this series (S.E.C. I) we investigated the effects of teaching style on pupil participation in discourse in classrooms where Signed English (S.E.) was employed for communication. In the present paper, we analyse the same classroom conversations from a different perspective. We present analyse of aspects of the grammatical complexity and completeness of teacher speech. We find no evidence to suggest that the simultaneous use of sign language disrupts the grammatical well-formedness of teacher utterances but, through comparisons with the speech of teachers in oral classrooms, find that signing appears to reduce the incidence of complex clause structures in teacher communication. As in previous studies, we find that the complexity of teacher speech to deaf children does not vary significantly as a function of child age (or hearing loss or non-verbal IQ). Counter-intuitively, we also find that teachers who use most complex language are faced with children who show least signs of misunderstanding. The educational implications of this finding are discussed in relation to previous studies of hearing and orally educated deaf children. Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) analyses are used to explore relationships between teaching style, grammatical complexity and child performance. The implications of the resultant findings for hypotheses about the impact of the use of signs on communication with deaf children are explored. Further use of MLR procedures reveals that the relations between teaching style and child participation are largely independent of the frequency of teacher signing.

An effective representation of complex clauses in a relational database

A mechanism for storing and retrieving arbitrary complex PROLOG clauses from a relational database is presented. This mechanism can be used to implement a filter module that sits on top of the database management system (DBMS) and offers clause retrieval functions to the PROLOG interpreter. The filter module accepts arbitrary complex goal literals as input and returns all clauses (potentially) matching the goal. The presented mechanism is able to handle ground and non-ground facts as well as rules. For clause retrieval it derives search predicates from the constants of goal literals as well as multiple occurrences of goal variables. The presented method is flexible enough to support a wide range of filter selectivity, i.e. it can be used to implement highly-selective as well as arbitrary coarse filters. The structures needed to represent clauses in the DBMS are simple: each clause is entirely stored in a single tuple, which also contains all information needed for selection purposes. To retrieve the clauses matching a given goal, one DBMS query operating on a single table is to be executed, independent of the complexity of the stored clauses and the degree of selectivity provided by the filter.

On notional relations in the relative clause complex

On notional relations in the relative clause complex